The Kingdom of Gods

I drift through dreaming. Since I am not mortal, there are no nightmares. I never find myself naked in front of a crowd, because that would never bother me. (I would waggle my genitals at them, just to see the shock on their faces.) Most of what I dream is memory, probably because I have so many of them.

Images of parents and children. Nahadoth, shaped like some sort of great star-flecked beast, lies curled in a nest of ebon sparks. This is in the days before mortals. I am a tiny thing half hidden in the nest’s glimmers. An infant. I huddle against her for comfort and protection, mewling like a new kitten, and she strokes me and whispers my name possessively—

Shahar again. The Matriarch, not the girl I know. She is younger than in my last dream, in her twenties perhaps, and she sits in a window with an infant at her breast. Her chin is propped on her fist; she pays little attention to the babe as it sucks. Mortal, this child. Fully human. Another human child sits in a basket behind her—twins—tended by a girl in priest’s robes. Shahar wears robes, too, though hers are finer. She is high ranking. She has borne children as her faith demands, but soon she will abandon them, when her lord needs her. Her eyes are ever on the horizon, waiting for dawn—

Enefa, in the fullest glory of her power. All her experiments, all the tests and failures, have reached the pinnacle of success at last. Merging life and death, light and dark, order and chaos, she brings mortal life to the universe, transforming it forever. She has been giving birth for the past billion years. Her belly is an earth of endless vastness and fecundity, rippling as it churns forth life after life after life. We who have already been born gaze upon this geysering wonder in worshipful adoration. I come to her, bringing an offering of love, because life needs that to thrive. She devours it greedily and arches, crying out in agony and triumph as another species bursts forth. Magnificent. She gropes for my hand because her brothers have gone off somewhere, probably together, but that’s all right. I am the oldest of her god-children, a man grown. I am there for her when she needs me. Even if she does not need me very often—

Myself. How strange. I sit on a bed in the first Sky, in mortal flesh, confined to it by mad Itempas and my dead mother’s power. This is in the early years, I can tell, when I fought my chains at every turn. My flesh still bears the red weals of a whip, and I am older than I like, weakened by the damage. A young man. Yet I sit beside a longer, larger form whose back is to me. Male, adult, naked. Mortal: black hair a tangled mass. Sickly white skin. Ahad, who had no name back then. He is weeping, I know the way shoulders shake during sobs, and I—I do not remember what I have done to him, but there is guilt as well as despair in my eyes—

Yeine. Who has never borne a child as mortal or goddess, yet who became my mother the instant she met me. She has the nurturing instincts of a predator: choose the most brutal of mates, destroy anything that threatens the young, raise them to be good killers. Yet compared to Enefa, she is a fountain of tenderness, and I drink her love so thirstily that I worry she will run out. (She never has.) In mortal flesh we curl on the floor of the Wind Harp chamber, laughing, terrified of the dawn and the doom that seems inevitable, yet which is, in fact, only the beginning—

Enefa, again. The great quickening is long done. These days she makes few new children, preferring to observe and prune and transplant the ones she already has, on the nonillion worlds where they grow. She turns to me and I shiver and become a man by her will, though by this point I have realized that child is the most fundamental manifestation of my nature. “Don’t be afraid,” she says when I dare to protest. She comes to me, touches me gently; my body yields and my heart soars. I have yearned for this, so long, but—

I am dying, this love will kill me, get it away oh gods I have never been so afraid—

Forget.

13

Mortal life is cycles. Day and night. Seasons. Waking and sleep. This cyclical nature was built into all mortal creatures by Enefa, and the humans have refined it further by building their cultures to suit. Work, home. Months become years, years shift from past to future. They count endlessly, these creatures. It is this which marks the difference between them and us, I think, far more than magic and death.

For two years, three months, and six days, I lived as ordinary a life as I could. I ate. I slept. I grew healthier, taking pains to make myself sleek and strong, and dressed better. I contemplated asking Glee Shoth to arrange a meeting between myself and Itempas. I chose not to, because I hated him and would rather die. Perfectly ordinary.

The work was ordinary, too, in its way. Each week I traveled wherever Ahad chose to send me, observing what I could, interfering where I was bidden. Compared to the life of a god… well. It was not boring, at least. It kept me busy. When I worked hard, I thought less. That was a good and necessary thing.

The world was not ordinary, either. Six months after I’d met her, and three months after the birth of her latest lamented son, Usein Darr’s father died of the lingering illness that had incapacitated him for some while. Immediately afterward, Usein Darr got herself elected as one of the High North delegates. She traveled to Shadow in time for the Consortium’s voting season, whereupon her first act was to give a fiery speech openly challenging the existence of Shadow’s delegate. No other single city had a delegate on the Consortium. “And everyone knows why,” Usein declared, then dramatically (according to the news scrolls) turned to glare into the eyes of Remath Arameri, who sat in the family box above the Consortium floor. Remath said nothing in reply—probably because everyone did know why, and there was no point in her confirming the obvious. Shadow’s delegate was in fact Sky’s delegate, little more than another mouthpiece through which the Arameri could make their wishes known. This was nothing new.

What was new was that Usein’s protest was not struck down by the Consortium Overseer; and that several other nobles—not all northerners—rose to voice agreement with her; and that in the subsequent secret vote, nearly a third of the Consortium agreed that Shadow’s delegate should be abolished. A loss, and yet a victory. Once upon a time, such a proposal would never have even made it to vote.

It was not a victory so much as a shot across the bow. Yet the Arameri did not respond in kind, as the whispers predicted in the Arms of Night’s parlor and the back of the bakery and even at the dinner table with Hymn’s family each evening. No one tried to kill Usein Darr. No mysterious plagues swept through the stone-maze streets of Arrebaia. Darren blackwood and herbal rarities continued to fetch high prices on the open and smugglers’ markets.

I knew what this meant, of course. Remath had drawn a line somewhere, and Usein simply had yet to cross it. When she did, Remath would bring such horrors to Darr as the land had never seen. Unless Usein’s mysterious plans reached fruition first.

Politics would never be interesting enough to occupy the whole of my attention, however, and as the days became months and years, I felt ever more the weight of unfinished, childishly avoided business upon my soul. Eventually one particular urge became overwhelming, and on a slow day, I begged a favor of Ahad. Surprisingly, he obliged me.

Deka was still at the Litaria. That I hadn’t expected. After Shahar’s betrayal, I had braced myself to find him in Sky somewhere. She had done it to get him back, hadn’t she? Yet when Ahad’s magic settled, I found myself in the middle of a classroom. The chamber was circular—a remnant of the Litaria’s time as part of the Order of Itempas—and the walls were lined by slate covered in chalk renderings: pieces of sigils with each stroke carefully numbered, whole sigils lacking only a stroke or two, and strange numerical calculations that apparently had something to do with how scriveners learned our tongue.

I turned and blinked as I realized I was surrounded by white-clad children. Most were Amn, ten or eleven years old; all sat cross-legged on the floor, with their own slates or pieces of reed paper in their laps. All of them gaped at me.

I put my hands on my hips and grinned back. “What? Your teacher didn’t tell you a godling was dropping by?”

An adult voice made me turn, and then I, too, gaped as the children did.

“No,” drawled Dekarta from the lectern. “We’re doing show-and-tell next week. Hello, Sieh.”

Deka wore black now.

I had been surprised by this, but that was not the only shock. I stole little looks up at him—he was much taller than me now—as we walked through a brightly lit, carpeted corridor lined with the busts of dead scriveners. His stride was easy, unhurried, confident. He did not look at me, though he must have noticed me watching him. I tried to read his expression and could not. Despite his exile from Sky, he had still mastered the classic Arameri detachment. Blood told.

Oh, yes, it did. He looked like Ahad.

Demonshitting, hells-spawned, Yeine-loving ratbastard Ahad.

So many things made sense now; so many more did not. The resemblance was so strong as to be undeniable. Deka was an inch or two shorter than Ahad, leaner and somewhat unfinished in the manner of young men. He wore his hair short and plain, where Ahad’s was long and elaborate. Deka looked more Amn, too; Ahad’s features leaned more toward the High Norther template. But in every other way, and particularly in this new aura of easy, dangerous strength, Deka might as well have been made as Ahad had: sprung to life full grown from his progenitor, with no mother in the way to gum things up.

Yet that could not be. Because if Ahad was some recent ancestor of Dekarta’s, then that meant Dekarta, and Shahar, and whichever of their parents carried Ahad’s blood, were demons. Demons’ blood should have killed me the day we’d made the oath of friendship.

And not like this, slowly, cruelly. I had seen what demons’ blood did to gods. It should have snuffed out the light of my soul like water on a candleflame. Why was I still alive at all, much less in this hobbled form?

I groaned softly, and at last Deka glanced over at me. “Nothing,” I said, rubbing my forehead, which felt as though it should ache. “Just… nothing.”

He uttered a low chuckle of amusement. My sweet little Deka was a baritone now, and not at all little anymore. Was he still sweet? That was something only time could tell.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“My laboratory.”

“Oh, so they let you use one by yourself?”

He had not stopped smiling; now he developed a smug air. “Of course. All teachers have their own.”

I slowed, frowning up at him. “You mean you’re a full scrivener? Already?”

“Shouldn’t I be? The course of study isn’t that difficult. I finished it a few years back.”

I remembered the wistful, shy child he had been—so unsure of himself, so quick to let his sister take the lead. Could it be that here, beyond the shadow of his family’s disapproval, he had unleashed that wild cleverness of his? I smiled. “Still the arrogant Arameri, in spite of everything.”

Deka glanced at me, his smile fading just a little. “I’m not Arameri, Sieh. They threw me out, remember?”

I shook my head. “The only way to truly leave the Arameri is to die. They’ll always come back for you, otherwise—if not for you, for your children.”

“Hmm. True enough.”

We had turned a corner in the meantime and headed down another carpeted corridor, and now Deka led me up a wide, banistered stairwell. Three girls carrying reed pens and scrolls bobbed in polite greeting as they came down the stairs and passed us. All three blushed or batted their eyes at Deka. He nodded back regally. As soon as they were out of sight around the corner, I heard their burst of excited giggling and felt a flicker of my old nature respond. Crushes: like butterfly wings against the soul.

At the top of the stairs, Deka unlocked and opened a pair of handsome wooden doors. Inside, the room was not what I expected. I had seen the First Scrivener’s laboratory in Sky: a stark, forbidding place of white gleaming surfaces that held only ephemeral touches of color, like black ink or red blood. Deka’s lab was Darrwood, deep and brown, and gold Chellin marble. Octagonal in shape, four of its walls were nothing but books—floor-to-ceiling shelves, each stacked two or three deep with tomes and scrolls and even a few stone or wooden tablets. Wide flat worktables dominated the center of the room, and something odd, a sort of glass-enclosed booth, stood on the room’s edge at the juncture of two walls. Yet there were no tools or implements in sight, other than those used for writing. No cages along the wall, filled with specimens for experiments. No lingering scent of pain.

I looked around the room in wonder and confusion. “What the hells kind of scrivener are you?”

Deka closed the door behind me. “My specialty is godling lore,” he said. “I wrote my concluding thesis on you.”

I turned to him. He stood against the closed doors, watching me. For an instant, in his stillness, he reminded me of Nahadoth as much as Ahad. All three had that same habit of unblinking intensity, which in Ahad covered nihilism and in Nahadoth covered madness. In Deka, I had no idea what it meant. Yet.

“You don’t think I tried to kill you, then,” I said.

“No. It was obvious something went wrong with the oath.”

One knot of tension eased inside me; the rest stayed taut. “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

He shrugged, ducking his eyes, and for a moment I saw a hint of the boy he’d been. “I still have friends in Sky. They keep me informed of events that matter.”

Very much still the Arameri, whatever his protestations to the contrary. “You knew I would be coming, then.”

“I guessed. Especially when I heard about your leaving, two years ago. I expected you then, actually.” He looked up, his expression suddenly unreadable. “You killed First Scrivener Shevir.”

I shifted from one foot to another, slipping my hands into my pockets. “I didn’t mean to. He was just in the way.”

“Yes. You do that a lot, I’ve realized from studying your history. Typical of a child, to act first and deal with the consequences later. You’re careful to do that—act impulsively—even though you’re experienced and wise enough to know better. This is what it means to live true to your nature.”

I stared at him, flummoxed.

“My contacts told me you were angry with Shahar,” he said. “Why?”

I set my jaw. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You didn’t kill her, I see.”

I scowled. “What do you care? You haven’t spoken to her for years.”

Deka shook his head. “I still love her. But I’ve been used as a weapon against her once already. I will not let that happen again.” He pushed away from the door abruptly and came toward me, and so flustered was I by his manner that I took a step back before I caught myself.

“I will be her weapon instead,” he said.

It took me a shamefully long time, all things considered, to realize that he had spoken to me in the First Tongue.

“What the hells are you doing?” I demanded, clenching my fists to keep from clapping a hand over his mouth. “Shut up before you kill us both!”

To my shock, he smiled and began to unfasten his overshirt. “I’ve been speaking magic for years, Sieh,” he said. “I can hear the world and the stars as gods do. I know when reality listens closest, when even the softest word will awaken its wrath or coax it into obedience. I don’t know how I know these things, but I do.”

Because you are one of us, I almost said, but how could I be sure of that? His blood hadn’t killed me. I tried to understand even as he continued undressing in front of me.

Then he got his overshirt open. I knew before he’d unlaced the white shirt underneath; the characters glowed dark through the fabric. Black markings, dozens of them, marched along most of his upper torso and shoulders, beginning to make their way down the flat planes of his abdomen. I stared, confused. Scriveners marked themselves whenever they mastered a new activation; it was the way of their art. They put our powerful words on their fragile mortal skin, using will and skill alone to keep the magic from devouring them. But they used ordinary ink to do it, and they washed the marks off once the ritual was done. Deka’s marks, I saw at once, were like Arameri blood sigils. Permanent. Deadly.

And they were not scrivening marks. The style was all wrong. These lines had none of the spidery jaggedness I was used to seeing in scrivener work: ugly, but effective. These marks were smooth and almost geometric in their cleanliness. I had never seen anything like them. Yet they had power, whatever they were; I could read that in the swirling interstices of their shapes. There was meaning in this, as multilayered as poetry and as clear as metaphor. Magic is merely communication, after all.

Communication, and conduits.

This is something we have never told mortals. Paper and ink are weak structures on which to build the framework of magic. Breath and sound aren’t much better, yet we godlings willingly confine ourselves to those methods because the mortal realm is such a fragile place. And because mortals are such dangerously fast learners.

But flesh makes for an excellent conduit. This was something the Arameri had learned by trial and error, though they’d never fully understood it. They wrote contracts with us onto their foreheads for protection, calling them blood sigils as if that was all they were, and we could not kill them, no matter how badly worded they were. Now Deka had written demands for power into his own skin, and his flesh gave the words meaning. He had written it in a script of his own devising, more flexible and beautiful than the rough speech of his fellow scriveners, and the universe would not deny him.

He had made himself not quite as powerful as a god—his flesh was still mortal, and the marks had only limited meaning—but surely more powerful than any scrivener who had ever lived. I had an inkling that his markings would be more effective than even the northerners’ masks; those were only wood and godsblood, after all. Deka was more than that.

My mouth fell open, and Deka smiled. Then he closed his undershirt.

“H-how…?” I asked. But I could guess. Demon and scrivener. A combination we had already learned to fear, channeled here toward a new purpose. “Why?”

“You,” he said, very softly. “I was planning to go find you.”

There was, fortunately, a small couch nearby. I sat down on it, dazed.

We exchanged stories. This was what Deka told me.

Shahar had been the one to suggest his exile. In the tense days after our oath and the children’s injury, the clamors for Deka’s execution had run loud in the halls of Sky. There were still a dozen or so fullbloods and twenty or thirty highbloods altogether. In the old days, they had not mattered because the family head’s rule had been absolute. These days, however, the highbloods had power of their own. Some of them had their own pet scriveners, their own pet assassins. A few had their own pet armies. If enough of them banded together and acted against Remath, she could be overthrown. This had never happened in all the two-millennia history of the Arameri, but it could happen now.

But when they had demanded Deka’s death, Shahar had spoken for him, as soon as she was well enough to talk. She had gone toe-to-toe with Remath—an epic debate, Deka called it, all the more impressive because one of its combatants was eight years old—and gotten her to acknowledge that exile was a more suitable punishment than death. Deka could never win enough support to become heir now, even if his looks could somehow be overcome. He would be forever branded by the stigma of failure. And Shahar needed him alive, she had argued, so as to have one advisor whose prospects were so truncated, so hopeless, that he would have no choice but to serve her faithfully in order to survive. Remath had agreed.

“I imagine dear Sister will fill this in when I go back,” Deka said then, touching his semisigil with a soft sigh. I nodded slowly. He was probably right.

So Deka had left Sky for the Litaria. The first few months of his exile had been misery, for with a child’s eyes, he had seen only his mother’s rejection and his sister’s betrayal. He had not reckoned, however, on one crucial thing.

“I am happy here,” he said simply. “It isn’t perfect; there are cliques and bullies, politics, unfairness, like anywhere. But compared to Sky, this is the gentlest of heavens.”

I nodded again. Happiness has healing power. Between that and the wisdom brought by maturity, Deka had come to realize what Shahar had done for him, and why. By then, however, several years had passed during which he’d returned all her letters, until she’d finally stopped sending them. It would have been dangerous in the extreme to resume communication at that point, because any of Shahar’s rivals—who were surely watching her mailings—would know that Deka was once again her weakness. There was strength in the fact that she could pretend not to love him and point to her hand in his exile as proof. And as long as Deka pretended not to love her back, they were both safe.

I shook my head slowly, though, troubled by his plan. Love could not be conditional. I had seen the danger of that too often. Conditions created a chink in otherwise unbreakable armor, left a fatal flaw in the perfect weapon. Then the armor broke, at precisely the wrong time. The weapon turned against its wielder. Deka and Shahar’s game could so easily turn real.

But it was not my place to say that, because they were still children enough to learn best through experience. I could only pray to Nahadoth and Yeine that they would not learn this lesson in the most painful way.

After our talk, Deka rose. An hour or so had passed. Beyond the laboratory windows, the sun had moved through noon into afternoon. I was hungry again, damn it, but no one had brought food. Perhaps there were no servants in this place where learning created its own hierarchy.

As if guessing my thought (though my stomach had also rumbled loudly), Deka went to a cabinet and opened a drawer, taking out several flat loaves of bread and a chub of dry sausage. He began slicing this on a board. “So why have you come? It can’t just have been to see an old friend.”

He still thought of me as a friend. I tried not to let him see how this affected me. “I did just want to see you, believe it or not. I wondered how you’d turned out.”

“You can’t have wondered all that hard, since it took you two years to come.”

I winced. “After Shahar, what happened with her, I mean… I didn’t want to see you, because I was afraid that you would be… like her.” Deka said nothing, still working on the food. “I thought you would be back in Sky by now, though.”

“Why?”

“Shahar. She made a deal with your mother to bring you home.”

“And you thought I would go as soon as my sister snapped her fingers?”

I faltered silent, confused. As I sat there, Deka turned back to me and brought the sausage and bread over, setting it before me as if he were a servant and not an Arameri. No poor man’s gristle-and-scraps here, I found when I took a slice. The sausage was sweet and redolent of cinnamon, bright yellow in color per the local style. The Litaria might make Remath Arameri’s son serve his own food, but the food was at least suited to his station. He’d brought a flask of wine, too, light and strong, of equal quality.

“Mother sent a letter shortly after you left Sky, inquiring as to when I might return,” Deka said, sitting in the chair across from me and taking a slice of meat for himself. He swallowed and uttered a short, sour laugh. “I responded with a letter of my own, explaining that I intended to remain until I’d completed my research.”

I burst out laughing at his audacity. “You told her you’d come back when you were good and ready, is that it? And she didn’t force you home?”

“No.” Deka’s expression darkened further. “But she had Shahar write to me, asking the same question.”

“And you said?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

He sat back in his chair, crossing his legs and toying with the glass of wine in his fingers. I didn’t like that pose for him; it reminded me too much of Ahad. “There was no need. It was a warning. Shahar’s letter said, ‘I am told the standard course of study at the Litaria is ten years. Surely you can finish your research within that time?’ ”

“A deadline.”

He nodded. “Two years to wrap up my affairs here and go back to Sky—or, no doubt, Mother’s willingness to let me return would expire.” He spread his hands. “This is my tenth year.”

I thought of what he’d told me and shown me. The strange new magic he’d developed, his vow to become Shahar’s weapon. “You’re going back, then.”

“I leave in a month.” He shrugged. “I should arrive by midsummer.”

“Two months’ traveling time?” I frowned. The Litaria was a sovereign territory within the sleepy agrarian land of Wiru, in southern Senm. (That way only a few farmers would die if the place ever blew to the heavens.) Sky was not that far. “You’re a scrivener. Draw a gate sigil.”

“I don’t actually need to; the Litaria has a permanent gate that can be configured to Sky’s. But to travel that way would make it seem as though I was afraid of assault. There is the family pride to consider. And more importantly, I will not slink to Sky quietly, like a bad dog finally allowed back into the house.” He sipped from his glass of wine. Over the rim, his eyes were dark and colder than I’d ever expected to see. “Let Mother and the rest of them see what they have chosen to create by sending me here. If they will not love me, fear is an acceptable substitute.”

For a moment I was stunned. This was not at all the Deka I remembered, but then, he was no longer a child, and he had never been a fool. He knew as well as I did what he was going back to in Sky. I could not blame him for hardening himself to prepare for it. But I did mourn, just a little, for the sweet boy I’d first known.

At least he had not become what I’d feared, though: a monster, worthy only of death.

Yet.

At my silence, Deka glanced up, gazing at me just a moment too long. Did he sense my unease? Did he want me to feel uneasy?

“So… what will you do?” I asked. I fought the urge to stammer.

He shrugged. “I informed Mother that I would be traveling overland and made note of the route. Then I sent it by standard courier, with only the usual privacy sigils in the seal.”

I whistled with a lightheartedness that I didn’t feel. “Every highblood in Sky will have seen it, then.” I frowned. “These mask-wielding assassins, though… And gods, Deka, if any of your relatives want you dead, you’ve given them a map for the best places to ambush you!”

“And if Mother stints me on an appropriate guard complement, that’s precisely what will happen.” He shrugged. “As head, she must be seen to at least try to protect the Central Family, the Matriarch’s bloodline. To do any less would make her unfit to lead. So she’ll likely send a whole legion to escort me—thus the two months of travel.”

“Caught in your own trap. Poor Deka.” He smiled, and I grinned back. Yet I found myself sobering. “What if there is an attack, though? Assassins, regardless who sends them? A legion of enemy soldiers?”

“I’ll be fine.”

There was arrogance, and there was stupidity. “You should be afraid, Deka, no matter how powerful you’ve become. I’ve seen this mask magic. It’s like nothing the Litaria has prepared you for.”

“I’ve seen Shevir’s notes, and the Litaria has been closely involved in the investigation into this new magical form. The masks are like scrivening, like the gods’ language: merely a symbolic representation of a concept. Once one understands this, it is possible to develop a countermeasure.” He shrugged. “And these mask makers don’t know anything about my new magical form. No one does but me. And now you.”

“Um. Oh.” I fell silent again, awkwardly.

Abruptly, Deka smiled. “I like this,” he said, nodding toward me. “You’re different now, not just physically. Not so much the brat. Now you’re more…” He thought a moment.

“Heartless bastard?” I smiled. “Obnoxious ass?”

“Tired,” he said, and I sobered. “Unsure of yourself. The old you is still there, but it’s almost buried under other things. Fear, most noticeably.”

Inexplicably, the words stung. I stared back at him, wondering why.

His expression softened, a tacit apology. “It must be hard for you. Facing death, when you’re a creature of so much life.”

I looked away. “If mortals can do it, I can.”

“Not all mortals do, Sieh. You haven’t drunk yourself to death yet, or flung yourself into dangerous situations, or killed yourself in any of a hundred other ways. Considering that death is a new reality for you, you’re handling it remarkably well.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his eyes boring into my own. “But the biggest change is that you’re not happy anymore. You were always lonely; I saw that even as a child. But the loneliness wasn’t destroying you back then. It is now.”

I flinched back from him, my thoughts moving from stunned toward affronted, but they lacked the strength to go all the way there, instead flopping somewhere in between. A lie came to my lips, and died. All that remained was silence.

A hint of the old self-deprecation crossed Deka’s face; he smiled ruefully. “I still want to help you, but I’m not sure if I can. You aren’t sure you like me anymore, for one thing.”

“I—” I blurted. Then I got up and walked away from him, over to one of the windows. I had to. I didn’t know what to say or how to act, and I didn’t want him to say anything else. If I’d still had my power, I would have simply left the Litaria. Maybe the mortal realm entirely. As it was, the best I could do was flee across the room.

His sigh followed me, but he said nothing for a long while. In that silence, I began to calm down. Why was I so agitated? I felt like a child again, one with jittery buttons dancing on his skin, like in an old Teman tale I’d heard. By the time Deka spoke, I was almost myself again. Well, not myself. But human, at least.

“You came to us all those years ago because you needed something, Sieh.”

“Not two little mortal brats,” I snapped.

“Maybe not. But we gave you something that you needed, and you came back for it twice more. And in the end, I was right. You did want our friendship. I’ve never forgotten what you said that day: ‘Friendships can transcend childhood, if the friends continue to trust each other as they grow older and change.’ ” I heard him shift in his chair, facing my back. “It was a warning.”

I sighed, rubbing my eyes. The meat and bread sat uneasily in my belly. “It was sentimental rambling.”

“Sieh.” How could he know so much, so young? “You were planning to kill us. If we became the kind of Arameri who once made your life hell—if we betrayed your trust—you knew you would have to kill us. The oath, and your nature, would have required it. You told us that because you didn’t want to. You wanted real friends. Friends who would last.”

Had that been it? I laughed hopelessly. “And now I’m the one who won’t last much longer.”

“Sieh—”

“If it was like you say, I would have killed Shahar, Deka. Because she betrayed me. She knew I loved her, and she used me. She…” I paused, then looked up at the reflection in the window. My own face in the foreground, pinched and tired, too big as always, shaped wrong, old. I had never understood why so many mortals found me attractive in this shape. In the background, watching me from the couch on which he sat, Deka. His eyes met mine in the glass.

“I slept with her,” I said, to hurt him. To shut him up. “I was her first, in fact. Little Lady Shar, so perfect, so cute. You should have heard her moan, Deka; it was like hearing the Maelstrom itself sing.”

Deka only smiled, though it seemed forced. “I heard about Mother’s plan.” He paused. “Is that why you didn’t kill Shahar? Because it was Mother’s plan and not hers?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know why I didn’t kill her. There was no why. I do what feels good.” I rubbed my temples, where a headache had begun.

“And you didn’t feel like murdering the girl you loved.”

“Gods, Deka!” I rounded on him, clenching my fists. “Why are we talking about this?”

“So it was just lust? The god of childhood leaps on the first half-grown woman he meets who’s willing?”

“No, of course not!”

He sighed and got to his feet. “She was just another Arameri, then, forcing you into her bed?” The look on his face showed that he didn’t remotely believe that. “You wanted her. You loved her. She broke your heart. And you didn’t kill her because you love her still. Why does that trouble you so?”

“It doesn’t,” I said. But it did. It shouldn’t have. Why did it matter to me that some mortal had done precisely what I’d expected her to do? A god should not care about such things. A god…

… should not need a mortal to be happy.

Gods. Gods. What was wrong with me? Gods.

Deka sighed and came over to me. There were many things in his eyes: compassion. Sorrow. Anger, though not at me. Exasperation. And something more. He stopped in front of me, and I was not as surprised as I should have been that he lifted a hand to cup my cheek. I did not pull away, either. As I should have.

“I will not betray you,” he murmured, much too softly. This was not the way a friend spoke to a friend. His fingertips rasped along the edge of my jaw. This was not the touch of a friend. But—I did not think—Oh, gods, was he…

“I’m not going anywhere, either. I have waited so long for you, Sieh.”

I started, confused, remembering. “Wait, where did you hear—”

Then he kissed me, and I fell.

Into him. Or he enveloped me. There are no words for such things, not in any mortal language, but I will try, I will try to encapsulate it, confine it, define it, because my mind does not work the way it once did and I want to understand, too. I want to remember. I want to taste again his mouth, spicy and meaty and a little sweet. He had always been sweet, especially that first day, when he’d looked into my eyes and begged me to help them. I craved his sweetness. His mouth opened and I delved into it, meeting him halfway. I had blessed him that day, hadn’t I? Perhaps that was why, now, the purest of magic surged through him and down my throat, flooding my belly, overflowing my nerves until I gasped and tried to cry out, but he would not let my mouth go. I tried to back away but the window was there. We could not travel to other realms safely. My only choice was to release the magic or be destroyed. So I opened my eyes.

Every lantern in the room flared like a bonfire, then burst in a cloud of sparks. The walls shook, the floor heaved. One of the shelves on a nearby bookcase collapsed, spilling thick tomes to the floor. I heard the window frame rattle ominously at my back, and someone on the floor above cried out in alarm. Then Deka ended the kiss, and the world was still again.

Darkness and damnation and eighth-blooded unknowing Arameri demons.

Deka blinked twice, licked his lips, then flashed me the sort of elated, look-what-I-did grin I’d once been famous for. “That went better than expected.”

I nodded beyond him. “You were expecting this?”

He turned, and his eyes widened at the fallen shelf, the now-smoldering lanterns. One lay on the floor, its glass shattered. As he stared, a scroll that had not dropped with the others fluttered to the shelf below, forlorn.

I touched his shoulder. “You need to send me back to Shadow.” This made him turn around, a protest already on his lips. I gripped his shoulder to make him listen. “No. I won’t do this again, Deka. I can’t. You were right about Shahar. But that’s why… I, with you, I—” I sighed, inexpressibly weary. Why did mortal troubles never wait for convenient times? “Gods, I can’t do this right now.”

I saw Deka struggle for a mature response, which heartened me because it meant that he had not somehow outgrown me at a mere eighteen years. He took a deep breath and moved away from me, running a hand through his hair. Finally he turned to one of the tables in the room and pulled out a large sheet of the thick, bleached paper that scriveners used for their work. He took a brush, inkstone and stick, and reservoir from a nearby table, and said with his back to me, “The way you appeared was gods’ magic.”

“One of my siblings.” Your great-grandfather. Ahad was going to love this.

“Ah.” He prepared the ink, his fingers grinding the sigil-marked inkstone back and forth slowly, meditatively. “Do you think, next time, I’ll be able to summon you to me the way Shahar did?”

He was too tense to even attempt subtlety. I sighed and gave him what he wanted. “There’s only one way to find out, I suppose.”

“May I attempt it? At an appropriate time, of course.”

I leaned against the window again. “Yes.”

“Good.” The tension in his broad shoulders eased, just a touch. He began to sketch the sigil for a gate with quick, decisive movements—stunningly fast, compared to most scriveners I had seen. Every line was perfect. I felt the power of it the instant he drew the final line.

“I may be able to help you.” He said this briskly, with a scrivener’s matter-of-fact detachment. “I can’t promise anything, of course, but the magic I’ve been designing—my body-marking—accesses the potential hidden within an individual. Whatever’s happening to you, you’re still a god. That should give me something to work with.”

“Fine.”

Deka set the sigil on the floor and stepped back. When I went to stand beside it, his expression was as carefully blank as if he stood before Remath. I could not leave things that way between us.

So I took his hand, the one I’d held ten years before, when his demon blood had mingled with mine and failed to kill me. His palm was unmarked, but I remembered where the cut had been. I traced a line across it with a fingertip, and his hand twitched in response.

“I’m glad I came to see you,” I said.

He did not smile. But he did fold his hand around mine for a moment.

“I’m not Shahar, Sieh,” he said. “Don’t punish me for what she did.”

I nodded wearily. Then I let go of him, stepped onto the sigil, and thought of South Root. The world blurred around me, leaping to obey Deka’s command and my will. I savored the momentary illusion of control. Then, when the walls of my room at Hymn’s snapped into place around me, I lay down on the bed, threw an arm over my eyes, and thought of nothing but Deka’s kiss for the rest of the night.

14

It felt good to run up sand dunes. I put my head down and took care to churn the sand behind me and scuff up the perfect wave patterns the wind had etched around the sparse grasses. By the time I reached the top of the dune, I was out of breath, and my heart was pumping steadily within its cage of bones and muscle. I stopped there, putting my hands on my hips, and grinned at the beach and the spreading expanse of the Repentance Sea. I felt young and strong and invincible, even though I really wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t care. It was just nice to feel good.

“Hello, Sieh!” cried my sister Spider. She was down at the water’s edge, dancing in the surf. Her voice carried up to me on the salty ocean breeze, as clear as if I stood beside her.

“Hello, there.” I grinned at her, too, and spread my arms. “All the oceans in the world, and you had to pick the boiled one?” One of my siblings, the Fireling, had fought a legendary battle here during the Gods’ War. She’d won, but not before the Repentance was a bubbling stewpot filled with the corpses of a billion sea creatures.

“It has nice rhythms.” She was doing something strange in her dance, squatting and hopping from one foot to another with no recognizable semblance of rhythm. But that was Spider; she made her own music if she needed to. So many of Nahadoth’s children were like her, just a little mad but beautiful in their madness. Such a proud legacy our father had given us.

“All the dead things here scream in time with each other,” she said. “Can’t you hear them?”

“No, alas.” It almost didn’t hurt anymore, acknowledging that my childhood was gone and would never return. Mortals are resilient creatures.

“A shame. Can you still dance?”

In answer, I ran down the dune, side-sliding so that I wouldn’t overbalance. When I reached level ground, I altered my steps into a side-to-side sort of hop that had been popular in upper Rue once, centuries before the Gods’ War. Spider giggled and immediately came out of the water to join my dance, her steps alternating to complement mine. We met at the tideline, where dry sand turned to hard-packed wet. There she grabbed my hands and pulled me into a new dance, formal and revolving and slow. Something Amn, or possibly just something she’d made up on the spot. It never mattered with her.

I grinned, taking the lead and turning us in a looping circle, toward the water and away. “I can always dance for you.”

“Not so well anymore. You have no rhythm.” We were in northern Tema, the land whose people we had both watched over long ago. She had taken the shape of a local girl, small and lithe, though her hair was bound up in a bun at the back of her head as no self-respecting Teman would have done. “You can’t hear the music at all?”

“Not a note.” I pulled her hand close and kissed the back of it. “But I can hear my heart beating, and the waves coming in, and the wind blowing. I may not be exactly on the beat, but you know, I don’t have to be a good dancer to love dancing.”

She beamed, delighted, and then spun us both, taking control of the dance so deftly that I could not mind. “I’ve missed you, Sieh. None of the others ever loved to move like you do.”

I twirled her once more so that my arms could settle around her from behind. She smelled of sweat and salt and joy. I pressed my face into her soft hair and felt a whisper of the old magic. She was not a child, but she had never forgotten how to play.

“Oh—” She stopped, her whole body going taut with attention, and I looked up to see what had interested her so. A few dozen feet away on the beach, lurking near a dune as if ready to duck back behind it: a young man, slim and brown and handsome, fascinating in his shy eagerness. He wore no shirt or shoes, and his pants were rolled up to his knees. In one hand he carried a bucket full of sandy clams.

“One of your worshippers?” I murmured in her ear, and then I kissed it.

Spider giggled, though her expression was greedy. “Perhaps. Move away from me, Brother. He’s shy enough as it is, and you’re not a little boy anymore.”

“They’re so beautiful when they love us,” I whispered. I pressed against her, hungry, and thought for the umpteenth time of Deka.

“Yes,” she said, reaching back to cup my cheek. “But I don’t share, Sieh, and I’m not the one you want anyway. Let go now.”

Reluctantly I did so and stepped back, bowing extravagantly to the young man so that he would know he was welcome. He blushed and ducked his head, the long cabled locks of his hair falling forward. Because he was poor, he had wrapped the locks with some sort of threadlike seaweed and ornamented them with seashells and bits of bright coral, rather than the metal bands and gemstones most Temans preferred. He did begin to walk closer at our tacit invitation, holding the bucket in both hands with an air of offering. His whole day’s income, most likely—a sincere mark of devotion.

While he approached, Spider glanced back at me, her eyes gleaming. “You want to know about Kahl, don’t you?”

I blinked in surprise. “How did you know?”

She smiled. “I can hear the world just fine, Brother. The wind says you’re playing errand boy for Ahad, the new one. Everyone knows who he works for.”

“I didn’t.” I could not keep the sourness out of my voice.

“That’s because you’re selfish and flighty. Anyhow, of course that’s why you came. There’s nothing else in Tema that could be of interest to you.”

“Maybe I just wanted to see you.”

She laughed, high and bright, and I grinned, too. We had always understood each other, she and I.

“For the past, then,” she said. “Only for you, Sieh.”

Then, turning a little pirouette that marked a strange and powerful pattern into the sand, Spider stopped on one toe and dipped toward me, her other leg extending gracefully above her in a perfect arabesque. Her eyes, which had been brown and ordinary until then, suddenly glimmered and became different. Six additional tiny-pupilled irises swirled out of nowhere and settled into place around her existing irises, which shrank a bit to make room for them. The clam boy stopped where he was a few feet away, his eyes widening at the sight. I didn’t blame him; she was magnificent.

“Time has never been as straightforward as Itempas wished,” she said, stroking my cheek. “It is a web, and we all dance along its threads. You know that.”

I nodded, settling cross-legged in front of her. “No one dances like you, Sister. Tell me what you can.”

She nodded and fell silent for a moment. “A plains fire has been lit.” For an instant as she spoke, I glimpsed fingerlike palps wiggling behind her human teeth. She used magic to speak when she was in this state, or else she would have lisped badly. She had always been vain.

“A fire?” I prompted when she fell silent. Her eyes flickered, searching realms I had never been able to visit, even as a god. This was what I had come for. It was difficult to convince Spider to scry the past or future, because she didn’t like dancing those paths. They made her strange and dangerous, when all she really wanted to do was spin and mate and eat. She was like me; once, we had both had other shapes and explored our natures in other ways. We liked the new ways better, but one could never leave the past entirely behind.

“The Darre’s new ennu, I think, is the kindling. But this fire will burn far, far beyond this realm.”

I frowned at this. “How can mortal machinations affect anything more than mortal life?” But that was a foolish question. I had spent two thousand years suffering because of one mortal’s evil.

She shivered, her eyes glazing, though she never once lost her balance on that single toe. The clam boy frowned from where he knelt on the sand, his bucket set before him. When this was done, I knew, Spider would demand a dance with him. If he pleased her, and was lucky, she would make love with him for a few hours and then send him on his way. If he was not lucky… well. The clams would make a fine appetizer. Those mortals who choose to love us know the risks.

“A seashell.” Her voice dropped to a murmur, flat and inflectionless. “It floats on green wood and shining white bones. Inside is betrayal, love, years, and more betrayal. Ah, Sieh. All your old mistakes are coming back to haunt you.”

I sighed, thinking of Shahar and Deka and Itempas, to name a few. “I know.”

“No. You don’t. Or rather, you do, but the knowledge is buried deep. Or rather, it was.” She cocked her head, and all her dozen pupils expanded at once. Her eyes, speckled with holes, pulled at me. I looked into them and glimpsed deep chasms bridged by gossamer webs. Quickly I leaned back, averting my eyes. Anyone drawn into Spider’s world became hers, and she did not always let them go. Not even if she loved them.

“The wind blows louder by the moment,” she whispered. “Sieh, Sieh, Sieh, it whispers, in the halls of the unknowable. Something stirs in those halls, for the first time since Enefa’s birth. It is alive. It thinks. It considers you.”

This nonsense was not at all what I had expected, and not really what I wanted to hear. I frowned and licked my lips, wondering how to steer her back toward the knowledge I needed. “What of Kahl, Sister? The Arameri’s enemy?”

She shook her head suddenly, vehemently, closing her eyes. “He is your enemy, Sieh, not theirs. They are irrelevant. Innocent—ha!—bystanders.” She shuddered, and to my surprise she abruptly tottered on her toe, nearly losing her balance. The clam boy looked up suddenly, his face taut with fervor; I heard him utter a low, intent prayer. We have never needed prayers, but we do like them. They feel much like… hmm. Like a push, or a supporting hand on the back. Even gods need encouragement sometimes. After a moment, Spider steadied.

“Itempas,” she said at last, sounding abruptly weary. “He is the key. Stop being stubborn, Sieh; just talk to him.”

“But—” I clamped my teeth down on what I would have said. This was what I’d asked her to give me. I had no right to complain just because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Fine.”

With a sigh she opened her eyes, which were human again. When she straightened and stepped off the pattern, carefully removing her toe from its center without disturbing it, I saw the lingering sheen of magic within its lines.

“Go away now, Brother,” she said. “Come back in a million years, or whenever you think of me again.”

“I won’t be able to,” I said softly. In a million years I would be less than dust.

She glanced at me, and for just an instant her eyes flickered strange again. “No. I suppose you won’t, will you? But don’t forget me, Brother, amid all the new mysteries you’ll have to explore. I’ll miss you.”

With that, she turned to her clam boy and offered him her hand. He came and took it, rising, his face alight even as she suddenly grew four additional arms and wrapped all six of them about him tightly. She would probably let him live, given that he had helped her. Probably.

I turned and headed back over the dunes, leaving my sister to her dance.

It had been a busy month since my trip to see Deka. A week later had come the expected announcement: Remath Arameri was bringing her beloved son home at last. Dekarta had begun his journey toward Sky amid great fanfare and three whole legions of soldier escorts. They would make a tour of the procession, visiting a dozen of the southern Senm kingdoms before reaching Sky-in-Shadow on the auspicious summer solstice. I had laughed on hearing about the tour. Three legions? That went beyond any need to protect Deka. Remath was showing off. Her message was clear: if she could spare three legions just to protect a less-favored son, imagine how many she could bring to bear for something that mattered?

So Ahad had kept me on the move visiting this noble or that merchant, spending a night on the streets in a few cities to hear what the commonfolk thought, sowing rumors and then listening to see what truths sprang up as a result. There had been more meetings, too, though Ahad invited me only when he had to. Nemmer and Kitr had complained after I loosened the legs of their chairs one time. I couldn’t see what they were so upset about; neither had actually fallen. That would have been worth the broken collarbone Kitr gave me in recompense. (Ahad sent me to a bonebender for healing and told me not to speak to him for a week.)

So, left to my own devices, I’d spent the last few days tooling about Tema. Beyond the beach dunes stood a city, shimmering through the heat haze: Antema, capital city of the Protectorate. It had been the greatest city in the world before the Gods’ War and was one of the few cities that had managed to survive that horror mostly unscathed. These days it was not quite as impressive as Sky—the World Tree and the palace were just too stunning for any other city to top—but what it lacked in grandeur it made up in character.

I admired the view again, then sighed and finally fished in my pocket for the messaging sphere Ahad had given me.

“What,” he said, when the sphere’s soft thrum had finally gotten his attention. He knew exactly how long to keep me waiting; an instant longer and I would’ve stilled the activation.

I had already decided not to tell him about my visit with Spider, and I was still considering whether to request a meeting with Itempas. So I said, “It’s been a week. I’m getting bored. Send me somewhere.”

“All right,” he said. “Go to Sky and talk to the Arameri.”

I stiffened, furious. He knew full well that I didn’t want to go there, and why. “Talk to them about what, for demons’ sake?”

“Wedding gifts,” he said. “Shahar Arameri is getting married.”

It was the talk of the town, I discovered, when I got to Antema and found a tavern in which to get very, very drunk.

Teman taverns are not made for solitary drunkenness. The Teman people are one of the oldest mortal races, and they have dealt with the peculiar isolation of life in cities for longer than the Amn have even had permanent houses. Thus the walls of the tavern I’d fallen into were covered in murals of people paying attention to me—or so it seemed, as each painted figure sat facing strategic points where viewers might sit. They leaned forward and stared as if intent upon anything I might say. One got used to this.

One also got used to the carefully rude way in which the taverns were furnished, so as to force strangers together. As I sat on a long couch nursing a hornlike cup of honey beer, two men joined me because there were only couches to sit on and I was not churl enough to claim one alone. Naturally they began talking to me, because the tavern’s musician—an elderly twin-ojo player—kept taking long breaks to nap. Talking filled the silence. And then two women joined us, because I was young and handsome and the other two men weren’t bad-looking themselves. Before long, I was sitting among a laughing, raucous group of utter strangers who treated me like their best friend.

“She doesn’t love him,” said one of the men, who was well into his own honey horn and growing progressively more slurred in his speech because of it. Temans mixed it with something, aromatic sea grass seed I thought, that made it a fearsomely strong drink. “Probably doesn’t even like him. An Amn, Arameri no less, marrying a Temaboy? You just know she looks down her pointy white nose at all of us.”

“I heard they were childhood friends,” said a woman, whose name was Reck or Rook or possibly Rock. Ruck? “Datennay Canru passed all the exams with top marks; the Triadice wouldn’t have confirmed him as a pymexe if he wasn’t brilliant. It’s an honor to the Protectorate, the Arameri wanting him.” She lifted her Amn-style glass, which contained something bright green, and out of custom, all of us raised our drinks to answer her toast.

But as soon as our arms came down, her female companion scowled and leaned forward, her locks swinging for emphasis. “It’s an insult, not an honor. If the damned Arameri thought so much of our Triadice, they would’ve deigned to marry in before now. All they want’s our navy to guard against the crazy High Northers—”

“It’s an insult only if you make it one,” said one of the men, who spoke rather hotly because there were three men and two women and he was the homeliest of the group, and he knew that he was most likely to go home alone. “They’re still Arameri. They don’t need us. And she genuinely likes him!”

This triggered a chorus of agreement and protest from the whole group, during which I alternated my attention between them and a set of peculiar masks hanging on one of the tavern’s walls. They reminded me a bit of the masks I’d seen in Darr, though these were more elaborately styled and decorated, in the Teman fashion. They all had hair locks and jolly faces, yet somehow they were even more distracting than the staring mural people. Or perhaps I was just drunk.

After the argument had gone back and forth a few times, one of the women noticed that I had been quiet. “What do you think?” she asked, smiling at me. She was a bit older, relatively speaking, and seemed to think I needed the encouragement.

I finished the last of my horn, gave a discreet nod to the waiter for more, and sat back, grinning at the woman. She was pretty, small and dark and wiry as Teman women tended to be, with the most beautiful black eyes. I wondered if I was still god enough to make her faint.

“Me?” I asked, and licked spoiled honey from my lips. “I think Shahar Arameri is a whore.”

There was a collective gasp—and not just from my couch, because my voice had carried. I looked around and saw shocked stares from half the tavern. I laughed at all of them, then focused on my own group.

“You shouldn’t say that,” said one of the men, who had also been giving me the eye—though now, I suspected, he was rethinking that. “The Order doesn’t care what you say about the gods anymore, except Itempas, but the Arameri…” He darted a look around, as if afraid Order-Keepers would appear out of nowhere to beat me senseless. In the old days they would have. Lazy sots. “You shouldn’t say that.”

I shrugged. “It’s true. Not her fault, of course. Her mother’s the problem, see. She gave the girl to a god once, as a broodmare, hoping to make a demon-child. Probably let your pymexe have a free ride, too, to seal the deal. You say he’s a smart man. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind treading in the footsteps of gods.”

The waiter, who had been on his way to me with another horn, stopped just beyond the couch, his eyes wide and horrified. The man who had been thinking about me stood up, quickly, almost but not quite before his third companion, who’d ignored me entirely up to that point, leapt to his feet. “Canru is my second cousin, you green-eyed half-breed nobody—”

“Who’s a half-breed?” I drew myself up to my full sitting height, which made me nowhere near as tall as he was. “There’s not a drop of mortal in me, damn it, no matter how old I look!”

The man, already opening his mouth to roar at me, faltered to silence, staring at me in confusion. One of the women leaned away, the other closer; both had wide, wondering eyes. “What did you say?” asked the closer-leaner. “Are you a godling?”

“I am,” I said gravely, and belched. “Pardon me.”

“You’re as godly as my left testicle,” snapped the furious man.

“Is that very godly?” I laughed again, feeling full of mischief and rage and joy. The rage was strongest, so before the man could react, I shot out my free hand and grabbed at his crotch, correctly guessing precisely where his left testicle would be. It was child’s play—for a mean child, anyway—to grasp the thing and give it a sharp, expert twist. He screamed and doubled over, his face purpling with shock and agony as he grabbed at my arm, but dislodging me would’ve necessitated a harder pull on his tender bits. With his face inches from mine, I flashed my teeth and hissed at him, tightening my fingers just enough for warning. His eyes went wide and terrified for some reason, which I could tell had nothing to do with the threat to his manhood. I doubted that my eyes had changed; there wasn’t enough magic left in me for that. Something else, maybe.

“These don’t seem very godly to me,” I said, giving his balls another jiggle. “What do you think?”

He gaped like a fish. I laughed again, loving the flavor of his terror, the thrill of even this paltry, pointless sort of power—

“Let him go.”

The voice was familiar, and female. I craned my neck back, blinking in surprise to see that Glee Shoth stood behind my couch. She stood with her hands on her hips, tall and imposing and so very Maroneh in that room full of Temans. The look on her face was somehow disapproving and serene at once. If I hadn’t spent several billion years trying to provoke that precise expression on another’s face, I would have found it wholly disconcerting.

I beamed at her upside down and let the man go. “Oh, you are so his child.”

She lifted an eyebrow, proving my point. “Would you care to join me outside?” Without waiting to see if I agreed, she turned and walked out.

Pouting, I got to my feet and swayed a bit. My companions were still there, to my surprise, but they were silent, all of them regarding me with a mixture of fear and distaste. Ah, well.

“May both my fathers smile upon you,” I said to them, gesturing expansively and making a genuine effort to bless them, though nothing happened. “If you can manage to get a smile out of them, anyway, the ill-tempered bastards. And may my mother kill you all gently in your sleep, at the end of a long and healthy span. Farewell!”

The whole tavern was silent as I stumbled out after Glee.

She turned to walk with me as I reached the foot of the steps. I had not drunk so much that I couldn’t walk, but steadiness was another matter. As I had expected, Glee made no compensation for my weaving and stumbling, and for the first block or so, I lagged about three paces behind her. “Your legs are very long,” I complained. She was almost a foot taller than me.

“Make yours longer.”

“I can’t. My magic is gone.”

“Then move them faster.”

I sighed and did so. Gradually I drew alongside her. “Did you inherit anything from your mother? Or are you just him done over with breasts?”

“I have my mother’s sense of humor.” She glanced at me, contempt clear in her face. “I expected rather more of you, though.”

I sighed. “I’ve had a hard day.”

“Yes. When you cut off the messaging sphere, Ahad asked me to find you. He suggested I search the gutters. I suppose I should be glad he was wrong about that.”

I laughed, though a moment later my laughter faltered silent and I glared at her, affronted. “Why are you doing his bidding? Aren’t you his boss? And what does it matter if I relax a little? I’ve spent the past two years running that bastard’s errands, trying to help that pathetic little group of his keep this world from falling apart. Don’t I deserve a night off?”

She stopped. By this point we stood on a quiet street corner in a residential neighborhood. It was late enough that no one was about. Which is perhaps why, for just an instant, her eyes seemed to flare red-gold like a struck match. I started, but then they were brown again, and more than a little angry.

“I have spent nearly this past century trying to keep this world from falling apart,” she snapped. I blinked in surprise; she looked no older than thirty. I had forgotten that demons usually lived longer than humans, though both were mortal. “I’m not a god. I have no choice but to live in this realm, unlike you. I will do whatever I must to save it—including working with godlings like you who claim to despise Itempas, though in reality you’re just as selfish and arrogant as him at his worst!”

She resumed walking, leaving me behind because I was too stunned to follow. By the time I recovered, she had disappeared around a corner. Furious, I ran after her, only to nearly trip when I rounded the corner and found her there, waiting.

“How dare you!” I hissed the words. “I am nothing like him!”

She sighed, shaking her head, and to my greater fury she decided not to argue with me. That sort of thing has always driven me mad. “Has it even occurred to you to ask why I came? Or are you too inebriated to think that far?”

“I don’t—” I blinked. “Why are you here?”

“Because, as Ahad would have told you if you’d given him the chance to finish, we have work to do. Dekarta Arameri is altering and accelerating his route to proceed directly to Shadow in light of the engagement. When he and his escort arrive at Shadow—tomorrow, to foil potential troublemakers—there will be a grand procession through the city. Shahar Arameri is scheduled to appear publicly, on the steps of the Salon, for the first time since she gained her majority. The official announcement of the engagement will be made then, before the Nobles’ Consortium and half the city, and Dekarta will be officially welcomed home at the same time. It should be quite the event.”

Despite Glee’s needling, I was not, in fact, too inebriated to think. The Arameri were not given to public spectacle—or at least they hadn’t been during my time of servitude—mainly because it hadn’t been necessary. What could top the glory of their unstated, rarely seen, utterly devastating power? And Sky was symbol enough of who they were. But times had changed, and their power now derived at least partially from their ability to awe the masses who had once been beneath their notice.

And… I shivered as I realized it. What better opportunity could there be for the Arameri’s enemies to strike?

Glee nodded as she saw that I understood at last. “We will need everyone in the city, to watch for trouble.”

I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry. “I don’t have any magic left,” I said. “Not a drop. I can do a few tricks, things maybe scriveners can do, but that’s nothing much. I’m just a mortal now.”

“Mortals have their uses.” She said this with such delicate irony that I grimaced. “And you love them, don’t you? Shahar and Dekarta.”

I remembered the mask-decayed bodies I had seen two years before, during my disastrous few days in Sky. I tried to imagine Shahar’s and Dekarta’s corpses laid out in the same way, their faces obscured by burned masks and their flesh too destroyed even to rot.

“Take me there,” I said softly. “Wherever you’re going. I want to help.”

She inclined her head and extended a hand to me. I took it before it occurred to me to wonder what she could do. She wasn’t a godling, just a demon. A mortal.

Then her power clamped down on the world around us, taking us in and out of reality with a god’s deft strength. I could not help admiration; she had our father’s touch.

Glee had rented an inn room in the northern Easha section of Shadow, a thriving business district near the city’s center. I realized at once that it was one of the nicer inns—the kind of place I couldn’t afford even on the salary Ahad gave me, and especially not before a major event in the city. It sounded as though there was a large and raucous crowd in the common room downstairs. Every inn in the city was probably filling up as people from the surrounding lands poured in to see the spectacle. Even Hymn’s place would be getting some business amid this; I was glad, if so. Though hopefully they wouldn’t be so crass as to rent out my room.

Glee went to the window and opened the shutters, revealing the reason she’d brought us here. I went to stand beside her and saw that the window overlooked the Avenue of Nobles, at the distant end of which stood the imposing white bulk of the Salon. We had a good view: I could see the tiny figures of people milling about the avenue near the Salon’s wide steps and Order-Keepers in their conspicuously white uniforms setting up barriers to keep the onlookers back. Arameri did not appear in public often, though their faces were known thanks to the Order’s news scrolls and the currency. Everyone in a hundred-mile radius had probably traveled to the city, or was on their way, to catch a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse.

Glee pointed along the avenue in the opposite direction, since it ran past the building we were in. “Dekarta’s procession will enter the city from there. The route hasn’t been published, but it will be in the news scrolls tomorrow morning. That makes it difficult for assassins to plan. But the procession will have to travel along the avenue this far; there’s no other way for a large party to reach the Salon.”

“Which means they might strike anywhere along this street?” I shook my head, incredulous. Even if I’d still had magic, it was an impossible scenario to try and plan for. In the morning, the dozens of mortals around the Salon would have grown to hundreds; by afternoon, when the event was to take place, there would be thousands. How to find just one amid the morass? “Do you know how the assassins get their victims to don the masks?”

“No.” She sighed, and for an instant her stoic face slipped. I realized she was very tired, and troubled. Was Itempas doing nothing, fobbing all the work of protecting the world off on her? Bastard.

Turning from the window, Glee went to the room’s handsome leather chair and sat down. I turned to sit on the windowsill, because I have always been more comfortable on such perches than in any conventional seat.

“So, we stay here until tomorrow, and then… what?” I asked.

“Nemmer has a plan in place,” she said. “Her people have done such things before. She knows how best to utilize the strengths of both godlings and mortals. But since you and I are neither, she’s suggested that perhaps we could contribute most usefully by circulating through the crowd and keeping watch for anything unusual.”

I shifted to prop one leg against the window frame, sighing at her characterization of me. “I still think like a godling, you know. I’ve tried to adjust, be more mortal, but—” I spread my hands. “I have been the Trickster for more years than most mortals know how to count. I’m not sure I’ll live long enough to become anything else, in my head.”

She rested her head on the chair back and closed her eyes, evidently planning to sleep there. “Even gods have limits; yours are just different. Do what you can within them.”

Silence fell between us, but for the soft stir of a night breeze through the open window and the mortals in the common room below, who were singing some sort of song in lusty and off-beat cadence. I listened to them for a while, smiling as I recognized the song as a variation on one I’d taught their ancestors. I hummed the tune along with them until I grew bored, and then I glanced at Glee to see if she was asleep—to find her eyes open, watching me.

So I sighed and decided to address the matter directly. “So, little sister.” She lifted an eyebrow at this, and I smiled. “How old are you?”

“Older than I look, like you.”

Nearly a century, she’d said. “You’re Oree Shoth’s daughter.” I vaguely remembered her. A beautiful mortal girl, blind and brave. She had loved one of my younger brothers, who’d died. And she’d loved Itempas, too, apparently. I couldn’t see him coupling with her otherwise. Ephemeral intimacy offended him.

“Yes.”

“She still call him ‘Shiny’?”

“Oree Shoth is dead.”

“Oh.” I frowned. Something about her phrasing was odd, but I couldn’t figure out what. “I’m sorry.”

Glee was silent for a moment, her gaze disconcertingly direct. Another thing she’d gotten from him. “Are you really?”

“What?”

She crossed her legs primly. “I was always told that you were one of mortalkind’s champions, in the old days. But now you don’t seem to like mortals much.” She shrugged as I scowled. “Understandably. But given that, I can’t see you getting especially upset about one more death.”

“Well, that would mean you don’t know me very well, wouldn’t it?”

To my surprise, she nodded. “That’s precisely what it means. Which is why I asked: are you sorry for my mother’s death? Honestly.”

Surprised, I closed my mouth and considered my answer. “I am,” I said at last. “I liked her. She had the kind of personality that I think I could’ve gotten along with, if she hadn’t been so devoted to Itempas.” I paused, considering. “Even so, I never would’ve expected him to respond to that devotion. Oree Shoth must’ve been pretty special to make him take a chance on a mortal woman again…”

“He left my mother before I was born.”

“He—” Now I stared at her, flummoxed, because that was not at all like him. His heart did not change. But then I remembered another mortal lover and child he’d left behind, centuries ago. It was not his nature to leave, but he could be persuaded to do so, if it was in the best interests of those he cared for.

“Lord Nahadoth and Lady Enefa demanded it,” Glee said, reading my face. “He left only to save her—our—lives. So, later, when I was old enough, I went looking for him. Eventually I found him. I’ve traveled with him ever since.”

“I see.” A tale worthy of the gods, though she wasn’t one of us. And then, because it was in my mind and she knew it was there and there was no point in my trying to conceal the obvious, I asked the question that had hovered between us for the whole two years since we’d met. “What is he like now?”

She took her time answering, appearing to consider her words carefully. “I don’t know what he was like before the War,” she said, “or even during the years of your… incarceration. I don’t know if he’s the same as he was then, or different.”

“He doesn’t change.”

Another of those odd silences. “I think he may have.”

“He can’t change. It’s anathema to him.”

She shook her head, with familiar stubbornness. “He can. He did when he killed Enefa, and I believe he’s changed again since. He’s always been able to change, and he’s always done it, however slowly or reluctantly, because he’s a living being and change is part of life. Enefa didn’t make it that way; she just took the common qualities her brothers already possessed and put those into the godlings and mortals she created.”

I wondered if she’d had this conversation with Itempas. “Except she made mortalkind complete, unlike us.”

She shook her head again, the soft curls of her hair wafting gently as if in a breeze. “Gods are just as complete as mortals. Nahadoth isn’t wholly dark. Father isn’t wholly light.” She paused, her eyes narrowing at me. “You haven’t been a true child since the universe was young. And for that matter, the War in part began because Enefa—the preserver of balance—lost her balance. She loved one of her brothers more than the other, and that broke them all.”

I stiffened. “How dare you blame her! You don’t know anything about it—”

“I know what he told me. I know what I’ve learned, from books and legends and conversations with godlings who were there when the whole mess began, who watched from the sidelines and tried to think how to stop it, and wept as they realized they could not. You were too close, Sieh; you were hip-deep in the carnage. You decided Itempas was to blame without ever asking why.”

“He killed my mother! Who cares why?”

“His siblings abandoned him. Only for a brief time, but solitude is his antithesis; it weakened him. Then Shahar Arameri murdered his son, and that drove him over the edge. In this case, the ‘why’ matters a great deal, I think.”

I laughed, bitter, sick with guilt and trying to hide my shock. Solitude? Solitude? I had never known that—No, none of that mattered. It could not matter. “A mortal! Why in the Maelstrom’s name would he mourn a single mortal so powerfully?”

“Because he loves his children.” I flinched. Glee was glaring at me, her eyes plainly visible in the dim room. Neither of us had bothered to put on a light, because the light from the street lanterns was more than enough to see by. “Because he’s a good father, and good fathers do not stop loving if their children are merely mortal. Or if those children hate them.”

I stared at her and found myself trembling. “He didn’t love us when he fought us in the War.”

Glee folded her hands in front of her, steepling her fingers. She’d been spending too much time with Ahad. “From what I understand, your side was winning until Shahar Arameri used the Stone of Earth. Weren’t you?”

“What the hells does that matter?”

“You tell me.”

And of course I thought back to the worst days of my life. Shahar had not been the first to use the Stone. I had sensed a godling’s controlling hand first, sending searing power—the power of life and death itself—in a terrible wave across the battlefield of earth. Dozens of my siblings had fallen in that attack. It had nearly caught me, too. That had been the first warning that the tide was turning. Until then, the taste of triumph had been thick in my mouth. Who had that godling been? One of Tempa’s loyalists; he’d had his own, same as Nahadoth. Whoever it was had died trying to wield the power of Enefa.

Then Shahar had gotten the Stone, and she hadn’t bothered attacking mere godlings. She went straight for Nahadoth, whom she hated most because he had taken Itempas from her. I remembered watching him fall. I had screamed and wept and known then that it was my fault. All of it.

“He… didn’t have to…” I whispered. “Itempas. If he was so sorry, he could have just—”

“That isn’t his nature. Order is cause and effect, action and reaction. When attacked, he fights back.”

I heard her shift to get comfortable in the chair. I heard this, because I could not look at her anymore, with her fine dark skin and too-keen eyes. She was not as obviously alien as Shinda had been, all those centuries ago. She could hide among mortalkind more easily because her peculiar heritage did not immediately announce itself and because the last thing anyone noticed about a six-foot-tall black woman was the aura of magic. There was something about her that made me think she was quite capable of defending herself, too—and I sensed Itempas’s hand in that. Action and reaction. This mortal child would not die so easily; her father had made sure of that.

Our father.

“Many things triggered the War,” said Glee, speaking softly. “Shahar Arameri’s madness, Itempas’s grief, Enefa’s jealousy, Nahadoth’s carelessness. No one person is to blame.” She lifted her chin belligerently. “However much you might like to believe otherwise.”

I stayed silent.

Itempas had never been like Nahadoth. Naha plucked lovers from the mass of mortality like flowers from a meadow, and he discarded them as easily when they wilted or a more interesting flower came along. Oh, he loved them, in his own erratic way, but steadfastness was not his nature.

Not so Itempas. He did not love easily—but when he did, he loved forever. He had turned to Shahar Arameri, his high priestess, when Nahadoth and Enefa stopped wanting him. They’d never stopped loving him, of course; they’d just loved each other a little more. But to Itempas, it must have felt like the darkest of hells. Shahar had offered her love, and he had accepted it, because he was a creature of logic, and something was better than nothing. And because he had chosen to love her and please her, he had bent his own rules enough to give her a son. Then he’d loved that son and stayed with his mortal family for ten years. He could have easily been content with them for the remainder of their mortal lives. An eyeblink in a god’s eternity. No great matter.

He had left them only because Naha and Nefa had convinced him that the mortals would be better off without him. And Naha and Nefa had done that only because someone had lied to them.

Just a harmless trick, I had thought then. It harmed only the mortals, and then only a little. Shahar had status and wealth, and mortals were adaptable. They did not need him.

Just a harmless trick.

No one person is to blame, Itempas’s daughter had said.

I closed my mouth against the taste of old, ground-in guilt.

In my silence, Glee spoke again. “As for what kind of man he is now…” I thought she shrugged. “He’s stubborn, and proud, and infuriating. The kind of man who will move the earth and skies to get what he wants. Or to protect those he cares for.”

Yes. I remembered that man. How minute of a change was sanity to insanity and back? Not much, across the expanse of time.

“I want to see him,” I whispered.

She was silent for a moment. “I will not allow you to harm him.”

“I don’t want to harm him, damn it—” Though I had, I remembered, on one of the last occasions I’d seen him. She must have heard about that. I grimaced. “I won’t do anything this time, I promise.”

“The promise of a trickster.”

I forced myself to take a deep breath against my own temper, releasing that held breath rather than the furious words in my thoughts. It was not right, the way I thought of her. Mortal. Inferior. It was not right that I struggled to respect her. She was as much a child of the Three as I.

“There’s no promise I can offer that you’ll trust,” I said, and was relieved that my voice stayed soft. “You shouldn’t, really. I only have to keep promises to children. And honestly, I don’t know if even that applies anymore. Everything I am has changed.” I leaned my head back on the window and gazed out at the night-lit city below.

Nahadoth could hear any words spoken at night, if he wanted.

“Please let me see him,” I said again.

She watched me steadily. “You should know that his magic works only in certain circumstances. It’s not powerful enough to stop whatever’s happened to you—not in his current form.”

“I know. And I know you have to keep him safe. Do what you have to do. But if it’s possible…”

I could see her, very faintly, beyond my reflection. She nodded to herself slowly, as if I’d passed some sort of test. “It’s possible. I can’t promise anything, of course; he may not want to see you. But I’ll speak to him.” She paused. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Ahad.”

Surprised, I glanced at her. My senses were not so dull that I couldn’t still distinguish scents, and the faint whiff of Ahad—cheroots and bitterness and emotions like long-clotted blood—clung to her like stale perfume. It was a few days old, but she had been in his presence, close to him, touching him. “I thought you had a thing with him.”

She had the grace to look abashed. “I find him attractive, I suppose. That’s not ‘a thing.’ ”

I shook my head, bemused. “I’m still amazed that he had enough of a soul to be made into a complete and separate being. I don’t know what you see in him.”

“You don’t know him,” she said, with a hint of sharpness that told me there was more to the “thing” than she was letting on. “He does not reveal himself to you. He loved you once; you can hurt him as no one else can. What you think of him, and what he truly is, are very different things.”

I rocked back a little, surprised at her vehemence. “Well, clearly you don’t trust him—”

She flicked a hand impatiently, dismissively. Gods, she was so much like Itempas that it hurt. “I’m not a fool. It may be a long time before he sheds the habits of his former life. Until then, I’m cautious with him.”

I was tempted to warn her further: she needed to be more than cautious with Ahad. He had been created from the substance of Nahadoth in his darkest hour, nurtured on suffering and refined by hate. He liked to hurt people. I don’t think even he realized what a monster he was.

But that impatient little flick had been a warning for me. She wasn’t interested in whatever I had to say about Ahad. Clearly she intended to judge him for herself. I couldn’t really blame her; I wasn’t exactly unbiased.

I wasn’t tired, but clearly Glee was. She fell silent after that, and I turned back to the window to let her sleep. Presently her breathing evened out, providing a slow and curiously soothing background noise for my thoughts. The people in the common room had finally shut up. There was no one but me and the city.

And Nahadoth, appearing silently in the window reflection behind me.

I was not surprised to see him. I smiled at the pale glimmer of his face, not turning from the window. “It’s been a while.”

The change to his face was minute; a slight drawing together of those fine, perfect brows. I chuckled, guessing his thoughts. A while; two years. Barely noticeable, to a god. I’d taken longer naps. “Every passing moment shortens my life, Naha. Of course I feel it more now.”

“Yes.” He fell silent again, thinking his unfathomable thoughts. He didn’t look well, I decided, though this had nothing to do with his actual appearance, which was magnificent. But that was just his usual mask. Beneath that mask, which I could just barely perceive, he felt… strange. Off. A storm whose winds had faltered at the touch of colder, quelling air. He was unhappy—very much so.

“When you see Itempas,” he said at last, “ask him to help you.”

At this I swung around on the windowsill, frowning. “You’re not serious.”

“Yeine can do nothing to erase your mortality. I can neither cure nor preserve you. I meant it, Sieh, when I said I would not lose you.”

“There’s nothing he can do, Naha. He’s got less magic than me!”

“Yeine and I have discussed the matter. We will grant him a single day’s parole if he will agree to help you.”

My mouth fell open. It took me several tries to speak. “He’s endured barely a century of mortality. Do you really think we can trust him?”

“If he attempts to escape or attack us, I will kill his demon.”

I flinched. “Glee?” I glanced at her. She had fallen asleep in the chair, her head slumped to one side. Either she was a heavy sleeper, an excellent faker, or Naha was keeping her asleep. Most likely the latter, given the subject of our conversation.

She had tried to help me.

“Are we Arameri now?” I asked. My voice was harsher than usual in the dimness, deep and rough. I kept forgetting that it was not a child’s voice. “Are we willing to pervert love itself to get what we want?”

“Yes.” I knew he meant it by the fact that the room’s temperature suddenly dropped ten degrees. “The Arameri are wise in one respect, Sieh: they show no mercy to their enemies. I will not risk unleashing Itempas’s madness again. He lives only because the mortal realm cannot exist without him and because Yeine has pleaded for his life. I permitted him to keep his daughter only for this purpose. Demon, beloved… she is a weapon, and I mean to use her.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “You regretted what you did to the demons, Naha. Have you forgotten that? They are our children, too, you said—”

He stepped closer, reaching for my face. “You are the only child who matters to me now.”

I recoiled and struck his hand away. His eyes widened in surprise. “What the hells kind of father are you? You always say things like that, treat some of us better than others. Gods, Naha! How twisted is that?”

Silence fell, and in it my soul shriveled. Not in fear. It was simply that I knew, or had known, precisely why he did not love all his children equally. Differentiation, variation, appreciation of the unique: this was part of what he was. His children were not the same, so his feelings toward each were not the same. He loved us all, but differently. And because he did this, because he did not pretend that love was fair or equal, mortals could mate for an afternoon or for the rest of their lives. Mothers could tell their twins or triplets apart. Children could have crushes and outgrow them; elders could remain devoted to their spouses long after beauty had gone. The mortal heart was fickle. Naha made it so. And because of this, they were free to love as they wished, and not solely by the dictates of instinct or power or tradition.

I had understood this once. All gods did.

My hand dropped into my lap. It was shaking. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

He lowered his hand, too, saying nothing for a long, bruised moment.

“You cannot remain in mortal flesh much longer,” he said at last. “It’s changing you.”

I lowered my head and nodded once. He was my father, and he knew best. I had been wrong not to listen.

With a night-breeze sigh, Nahadoth turned away, his substance beginning to blend into the room’s shadows. Sudden, irrational panic seized me. I sprang to my feet, my throat knotting in fear and anguish. “Naha—please. Will you…” Mortal, mortal, I was truly mortal now. I was his favorite, he was my dark father, his love was fickle, and I had changed almost beyond recognition. “Please don’t leave yet.”

He turned back and swept forward all in one motion, and all at once I was adrift and cradled in the soft dark of his innermost self, with hands I could not see stroking my hair.

“You will always be mine, Sieh.” His voice was everywhere. He had never let anyone but me and his siblings into this part of himself. It was the core of him, vulnerable, pure. “Even if you love him again. Even if you grow old. I am not wholly dark, Itempas is not wholly light, and there are some things about me that will never change, not even if the walls of the Maelstrom should fall.”

Then he was gone. I lay on the patterned rug, shivering as the inn room began to warm up in Nahadoth’s wake, watching the silver curls of my own breath. I was too cold to cry, so I tried to remember a lullaby that Nahadoth had once sung to me, so that I could sing myself to sleep. But the words would not come. The memory was gone.

In the morning I woke to find Glee standing over me with a mixture of confusion and contempt on her face. But she offered me a hand to help me up from the floor.

A new little sister. And Ahad was a new sibling, too. I vowed to try and be a better brother to them both.

Dekarta’s procession was spotted on the outskirts of the city around midmorning. At the rate they were wending their way through the streets—passing through South Root, of all things; Hymn’s parents would make a killing—they would reach the Avenue of Nobles at twilight.

Auspicious timing, I decided. Then I followed Glee out of the inn and we slipped into the crowd to try and keep Shahar and Dekarta alive for a few paltry years more.

15

The steps of the salon were impressive on their own: white marble, wide and colonnaded, gently curving around the building’s girth. Clearly they were not impressive enough for Arameri tastes, however, and so the steps had been embellished. Two additional stairwells—immense and unsupported—curved off the Salon’s steps to the left and right like wings poised in flight. They were made of daystone so that they glowed faintly; only a scrivener could have built them. They were magnificent even against the looming backdrop of the Tree, which tended to diminish any mortal effort at grandeur to pointlessness. In fact, the twin stairwells seemed to come from the Tree itself, suggesting a divine connection for the people who descended them. Which was probably the point.

I could not see the platforms at the tops of the daystone stairways, but it was not hard to guess that the scriveners had etched gates into each. Shahar, Remath, and perhaps a few others of the Central Family would arrive by this means, then descend to the Salon’s actual steps. Revoltingly predictable, but they were Itempans; I couldn’t expect better.

Sighing, I craned my neck again from my vantage point: the lid of a muckbin at the corner of a dead-end street, about a block away from the Salon building. The Avenue of Nobles was a sea of mortal heads, thousands of people standing about or walking, laughing, talking, the aura of excitement wafting off them like a warm summer breeze. The city’s street artists had taken shameless advantage of the opportunity to make festive ribbon pennants, dancing puppets with the faces of famous folk, and small contraptions that blatted out a few flakes of sparkling white confetti when blown hard. Already the air was thick with the glittering motes, which did a marvelous job of capturing the thin, dappled light that passed for daytime in Shadow. Adults and children alike seemed to love the things. I shivered now and again as their pleasure in the toys stirred whatever was left of the god in me.

Hard to focus, amid so many distractions. (My hands itched to play with one of the puppets. It had been so long since I’d had a new toy.) But I had a job to do, so I kept scanning the crowd, holding on to a gutter pipe as I leaned this way and that. I would know when I found what I was looking for. It was only a matter of time.

Then, just as I had begun to worry, I spotted my quarry. Moving past a tightly packed group of middle-aged women who looked both thrilled and terrified to be among such a crowd: a boy of nine or ten years old. Amn, wearing old clothing that had the look of garments taken from a White Hall tithe pile, with unkempt hair that hadn’t seen a comb in days. He passed one of the women and stumbled, bracing one hand on her back to right himself and apologizing quickly. It was nicely done; he had bowed himself away and into the current of foot traffic almost before the woman realized he’d touched her.

I grinned, delighted. Then I hopped down from the bin lid (another man immediately claimed my place atop it, throwing a belligerent look at my back) and hurried after him.

Took half a block to catch up with him; he was small and wove among the members of the crowd as deftly as a river snake among reeds. I was a grown-up and had to be polite. But I’d guessed his destination—a pack of children milling about a stall that sold tamarind-lime juice—and that made it easy to head him off a few feet before he reached them. I caught his thin, wiry arm and stayed ready, because boys his age were not defenseless. They had no compunctions against biting, and they tended to run in packs.

The boy swore at me in polyglot profanity, immediately trying to pull free. “Leggo!”

“What’d you take?” I asked, genuinely curious. The woman hadn’t had a purse visible, probably fearing exactly what had happened to her, but there could have been one beneath her clothing. “Jewelry? A shawl or something? Or did you actually manage to get into her pocket?” If the latter, he was a master of his craft and would be perfect for my needs.

His eyes grew wide. “ ’In’t take nothin’! Who th’ hells—” He jumped suddenly and grabbed at my wrist, which was already emerging from his pocket. I’d gotten only one coin; my hands were too damned big now for proper pocket-picking. But his face turned purple with fury and consternation, and I grinned.

I lifted the hand that held the coin and closed my fingers around it. Didn’t even need magic for this trick: when I opened my hand again, two coins lay there, his and one from my own pocket.

The boy froze, staring at this. He did not take either coin, turning a suddenly shrewd and wary look on me. “Wh’you want?”

I let him go, now that I’d gotten his attention. “To hire you, and any friends you’ve got with similar inclinations.”

“We don’t want trouble.” The slangy, contracted Senmite he’d been using vanished as swiftly as he had, after lifting the woman’s purse. “Keepers don’t bother us as long as we stick to pockets and wallets. Anything more and they’ll hunt us down.”

I nodded, wishing I could bless him with safety. “All I want you to do is look,” I said. “Move through the crowd, see what you usually see, do what you usually do. But if you let me, I can look through your eyes.”

He caught his breath, and for a moment I couldn’t read his face. He was astonished and skeptical and hopeful and frightened, all at once. But he searched my face with such sudden intensity that I realized, far later than I should have, what he was thinking. When I did, I started to grin, and that did it: his eyes got as big as twenty-meri coins.

“Trickster, trickster,” he whispered. “Stole the sun for a prank.” En pulsed on my breast, pleased to be mentioned.

“No prayers, now,” I said, cupping his cheek with one hand. Mine. “I’m not a god today, just a man who needs your help. Will you give it?”

He inclined his head just a hair more formally than he needed to. Ah, he was marvelous. “Your hand,” I said, and he offered it to me at once.

I still had a few ways of using magic, though they were crude and weak and a betrayal of my pride to employ. The universe did not listen to me the way it once had, but as long as I kept the requests simple, it would grudgingly obey. “Look,” I said in our tongue, and the air shivered around us as I traced the shape of an eye into the boy’s palm with my fingertip. “Hear. Share.”

The outline flickered briefly, a silver flash like drifting confetti, and then the boy’s flesh was just flesh again. He peered at it, fascinated.

“Find your friends,” I said. “Touch as many of them as you can with this hand, and send them out among the crowd. The magic will end when the Arameri family head returns to Sky.” Then I closed my free hand and opened it again. This time a single coin sat in my palm: a hundred-meri piece, more than the boy could have stolen in a week, unless he’d gotten very bold or very lucky.

The boy’s eyes fixed on it, but he did not reach for it, swallowing. “I can’t take money from you.”

“Don’t be stupid,” I said, and tucked the coin into his pocket before I let him go. “No follower of mine should ever do something for nothing. If you need to change it safely, go to the Arms of Night in South Root and tell Ahad I sent you. He’ll be an ass about it, but he won’t cheat you. Now go.” And because he was staring at me, awe stunting his wits, I winked at him and then stepped back, letting myself vanish amid the crowd. There was no magic to this. It just took an understanding of how mortals moved when they gathered together in great herds like this. The boy did the same thing as part of his pickpocketing, but I had several thousand years’ experience on him. From his perspective, I seemed to disappear. I caught a final glimpse of his mouth falling open, and then I let the traffic carry me elsewhere.

“Smoothly done,” said Glee when I found her again. She had been waiting in front of a small café, standing as still and striking as a pillar amid the flow of babbling mostly Amn.

“You were watching?” The café had a bench, which was packed; I didn’t even try to sit. Instead I leaned against a wall, half in Glee’s shadow. Though neither of us were Amn, I was betting no one would notice me with her there. After five minutes I knew I was right; half the people who had passed us glanced at her, and the other half ignored us altogether.

“Some,” she replied. “I’m not a god. I can’t see without my eyes like you do. But I can see magic, even in a crowd.”

“Oh.” Demon magic was always strange. I slipped my hands into my pockets and yawned loudly, not bothering to cover my mouth despite the disgusted glances of a passing couple. “So, Itempas around here somewhere, too?”

“No.”

I snorted. “What exactly is it that you’re protecting him from? Nothing short of demons’ blood can kill him, and who would do that, given the consequences?”

She said nothing for a long moment, and I thought she would ignore me. Then she said, “How much do you know about godsblood?”

“I know the mortals drink it, when they can, for a taste of magic.” My lip curled. During my first few decades in Sky, some of the Arameri had taken blood from me. It had done nothing for them, since my flesh then was more or less mortal, but that hadn’t stopped them from trying. “I know some of my siblings sell it to them, gods know why.”

Glee shrugged. “Our organization, via Kitr’s group, keeps an eye on such sales. A few months ago, Kitr received a request for some very unusual godsblood. More unusual, anyway, than the standard requests for menstrual flow or heart blood.”

Now it was my turn to be surprised, mostly because I hadn’t realized any of my sisters bothered menstruating. Why in darkness—Well, it didn’t matter. “Itempas is mortal now. His flesh is, anyway. His blood would only sour some poor mortal’s stomach.”

“He’s still one of the Three, Sieh. Even without magic, his blood has value. And who’s to say that these mask users can’t find a way to eke magic out of Father’s blood even in his current state? Remember that there is godsblood in the northerners’ masks… and remember that Kahl’s mask is yet incomplete.”

I cursed as I understood. I did this strictly in Senmite—too dangerous to speak our tongue under these conditions. No way to know who was listening or what strange magics slept nearby. “This is what comes of gods selling pieces of themselves to mortals.” My stupid, stupid younger siblings! Hadn’t they seen, again and again, that mortals would always find a way to use gods, hurt us, control us, if they could? I slammed a fist against the unyielding stone of the wall behind me and gasped as, instead of cracking the wall, my hand reminded me of its fragility with a white, breathtaking flash of pain.

Glee sighed. “Stop that.” Coming over, she took my hand and lifted it, turning it this way and that to see whether I’d broken the bone. I hissed and tried to pull away, but she threw me such a quelling glare at me that I stopped squirming and meekly held still. She would be a terrifying mother someday, if she ever had children.

“For what it’s worth, I agree with you,” she said quietly. “Though I don’t limit my condemnation to mortals. Remember what gods have done with the blood of demons, after all.”

I flinched at this, my anger evaporating into shame.

“Not broken,” she pronounced, and let me go. I cradled my hand to my chest since it still hurt, and sulking made me feel better.

“Gods are not truly creatures of flesh,” Glee continued, nodding toward my injured hand. “I understand this. But the vessels that you wear in this realm contain something of the real you—enough to access the greater whole.” She let out a long, heavy breath. “The Arameri had Nahadoth in their possession for centuries. You know, better than I, how much of his body they might have taken in that time. And while I doubt they have anything of Yeine, they did have a piece of Enefa in their keeping.”

I inhaled. The Stone of Earth. The last remnant of my mother’s flesh, taken from the corporeal form that had died when Itempas poisoned her with demons’ blood. It was gone now, because Yeine had incorporated it into herself. But for two thousand years it had been a physical object, kept in the exclusive possession of mortals who had already developed a taste for the power of gods.

“A pound of the Nightlord’s flesh,” Glee said, “and perhaps nothing more than a speck of the Gray Lady’s. Add to that some portion of the Dayfather, and use mortal magic to stir the mix…” She shrugged. “I cannot imagine what would result from such a recipe. Can you?”

Nothing good. Nothing sane. To mingle the essences of the Three was to invoke a level of power that no mortal, and few godlings, could handle safely. The crater that would be left by such an attempt would be immense—and it would be a crater not on the face of the world but on reality itself.

“No god would do this,” I murmured, shaken. “This Kahl… he has to know how dangerous this is. He can’t be planning what we think he’s planning.” Vengeance was his nature, but this went beyond vengeance. This was madness.

“Nevertheless,” Glee said. “The worst case is what we must prepare for. And this is why I don’t intend to let anyone have my father.” The familiar look was there again, in the cold implacability of her voice and the stubborn set of her shoulders. For a moment I imagined a circle of light revolving about her, a white sword in her hands… but no.

“You’re mortal,” I said softly. “Even if you can somehow keep Itempas hidden from a god, you won’t be able to do it forever. If nothing else, Kahl can wait you out.”

She looked at me, and for an instant I was painfully aware that only the fragile shield of her skin stood between me and her deadly, demonic blood.

“Kahl will die before I do,” she said. “I’ll make certain of that.” With that, she turned and walked into the crowd, leaving me alone with my wonder and fear.

I bought a tamarind juice to console myself.

After a while, I decided to see whether the seed I’d planted had borne any fruit. Closing my eyes and sitting down on the steps of a closed bookstore, I sought out the boy who bore my mark. It took only a moment, and to my delight I found that he had spread the mark to eight others already, all of whom were now roving through the crowd on both sides of the barricaded street. I could hear through them, too—mostly the ever-present murmur of the crowd, punctuated by the occasional variance: horse hooves as a mounted Order-Keeper passed on the street, music as a busker plied his trade. All of the sights were from a child’s point of view. I sighed in longing and settled in to wait for the festivities to begin.

Two hours passed. Glee eventually came back and reported that Nemmer—who hadn’t bothered to speak to me—had sent a message that there was no sign of trouble thus far. Better still, Glee handed me a cup of savory ice flavored with rosemary and serry flowers that she’d bought from some vendor; for that alone I would love her forever.

As I licked my fingers, the crowd abruptly grew tense, and their noise trebled all at once. I had to keep my eyes closed in order to focus on the children’s vision, but through their eyes I saw the first white, waving banners of Dekarta’s procession, which had reached the Avenue of Nobles at last. There came a marching column of soldiers first, several hundred deep. In their midst rode a massive palanquin, gliding smoothly along on the shoulders of dozens of men. Mounted soldiers and Order-Keepers flanked this, some with an air that made me suspect they were scriveners, and more soldiers followed behind. The palanquin was simple and graceful in its design, little more than a railed platform, but it had been constructed of daystone, too, and shone like noonday in this perpetually twilit city.

And atop this, stunning and stark in black, stood Dekarta. He’d added a heavy mantle to his outfit, which suited his broad shoulders perfectly, and he stood with legs apart and his hands gripping the forward rail as if it were the yoke of the world. No detached gaze for him; his eyes scanned the crowd as the procession traveled, his expression as cool and challenging as I’d ever seen. When the palanquin stopped and the men lowered it to the ground, he did not wait for it to touch the street stones before he stepped off its side and strode forward, purposeful and swift. The soldiers parted clumsily, and his guards scrambled to follow. Deka stopped, however, on reaching the foot of the steps. There he flicked back his cloak and waited, his eyes trained on the World Tree—or perhaps he was gazing at the palace nestled in the lowest fork of its trunk. It was his first sight of home in ten years, after all. If he still considered Sky home.

The crowd, meanwhile, had gone mad for him. People on either side of the street barriers cheered, shouted, and waved their white pennants. Through one of my spy-children’s eyes, I saw a gaggle of well-dressed merchant girls scream and point at Deka and scream again, clutching each other and jumping up and down. It was more than his beauty, I realized. It was everything: his hauteur, the implied defiance of his clothing, the confidence that seemed to issue from his very pores. Everyone knew his story—born an outsider, the spare who could never be heir. That was part of it, too. He was more like them than a true Arameri, and he was stronger, not weaker, for his difference. They certainly seemed to love him for it.

But then there was a stir at the other end of the avenue. From somewhere within the Salon, two people emerged. Ramina Arameri, magnificent in a white uniform with the full sigil stark on his brow, and another man I didn’t recognize. Well dressed, Teman, tall for one of that race, with waist-length locks wrapped in silver cuffs and studded with what had to be diamonds. He wore white, too, though not completely. The centerline of his uniform, which otherwise matched Ramina’s, had been accented by a double line of green fabric edged in gold. The colors of the Teman Protectorate. Datennay Canru, Shahar’s husband-to-be.

They moved to the center of the steps and then stood waiting, their presence enough of a warning that no one missed what followed.

There was a flicker atop both sets of daystone steps, and in the same instant two women appeared. To the right was Remath, clad in a deceptively simple white satin gown, carrying an object that made my belly clench: a glass scepter, tipped with a spadelike sharp blade. To the left…

In spite of everything that had happened, in spite of my resolve to be a man and not a boy about it, I had to open my own eyes to see her for myself. Shahar.

It was clear that Remath intended for her daughter to be the center of attention. This was not difficult, as like Dekarta, Shahar had only grown in beauty over the years. Her figure had filled out, her hair was longer, and the lines of her face seemed more settled and mature—the face of a woman, at last, rather than a girl. The dress she wore seemed barely attached to her flesh. The base garment was a translucent tube, thin enough that all of Shadow could see her pale skin through its fabric—but at her breasts and hips, enormous silvery flower petals, loose and curling and long as a man’s arm, had been adhered to the material. They drifted behind her like clouds as she came down the steps. There was a collective gasp from the crowd as everyone realized: the petals were real and taken from the World Tree’s flowers. Given the size, however, they could only have been blossoms from very high on the Tree, where the Tree pierced the world’s envelope. No mortal flower collector could climb to such airless heights, and the Arameri no longer had god-slaves. How had they gotten them? Regardless, the effect was perfect: Shahar had become a mortal woman swathed in the divine.

Shahar’s expression, unlike Remath’s, was everything an Arameri heir’s should be: proud, arrogant, superior. But when she turned to face her mother and they walked toward each other, she lowered her gaze with just the perfect touch of humility. The world was not hers, not yet, not quite. Mother and daughter met between the steps, and Remath took Shahar’s left hand in her right. Then—with such casual grace that they had to have practiced it dozens of times—both women turned toward the Avenue of Nobles and raised their free hands toward Dekarta, in clear welcome.

Showing no hint of the reticence or resentment that I suspected he felt, Dekarta climbed the steps to reach them, then knelt at their feet. Both women bent, offering him their hands, each of which he took in his own. Then he rose, moving to Remath’s left, and all three turned to face the waiting masses, raising their joined hands for the world to see.

The crowd was a many-headed beast, screaming, stamping, cheering. The air was so full of glittering confetti that the city seemed to have been struck by a silver snowstorm. And as this little show took place, I redoubled my concentration and straightened from my slouch against the wall. I caught a glimpse of Glee, not far off: she stood tense, scanning the street with whatever peculiar senses a demon could bring to bear. This was the moment, I felt with certainty. If Usein Darr or Kahl or some ambitious Arameri rival meant to strike, they would do it now.

Sure enough, one of my spy-children saw something.

It might have been nothing. The busker I had noticed earlier near the public well had stopped playing a battered old brass lunla to peer at something. I would have dismissed the image if it had not come from my clever one, the pickpocket I’d marked. If he was paying such sudden and close attention to the busker, then there was something about the busker worth seeing.

I noticed the busker’s open lunla case, which he’d set out before him as a silent appeal to passersby. Atop the layer of coins and notes scattered on the worn velvet, someone had tossed a larger object. I saw the busker pick it up, frowning in puzzlement. I saw the eyeholes and caught a quick glimpse of lacing lines on the inside of the thing before the busker turned it around, trying to figure out what it was.

A mask.

I was moving before I opened my eyes. Glee was beside me, both of us rudely shoving our way through the crowd as needed. She had taken out the small messaging sphere again, and this time it glowed red instead of white, sending some wordless signal. For an instant my god-senses actually worked, and in that span, I felt the faint tremor of my siblings’ movements, folding and unfolding the world as they converged on the area.

Through the eyes of my boy, I saw the busker’s face go suddenly slack, as though a brain fit had seized him. Instead of twitching or slumping, however, he moved the mask forward, like a man moving in a dream. He put it over his face. As he tied it at the back, I caught a glimpse of white lacquer and starkly drawn shade lines. The suggestion of an entirely different face: implacable, serene, frightening. I had no idea what archetype it had been meant to symbolize. Through the eyeholes of this, the busker blinked once, sudden awareness and confusion coming into them as though he couldn’t fathom why he’d put the demonshitting thing on. He reached up to pull it off.

The designs of the mask flickered, as if they’d caught the light for a moment. A breath later, the man’s eyes went dead. Not closed, not dazed. I am a son of Enefa; I know death when I see it.

Yet the busker got to his feet and looked around, pausing as his white-masked face oriented on the top of the Salon steps. I expected him to begin walking in that direction. Instead he charged toward the steps, running faster than any mortal should have been able, plowing down or flinging aside—far aside—anyone unfortunate enough to get in his way.

I also did not expect the cobblestones that edged the Salon steps to suddenly flare white, revealing themselves to be bricks of daystone that someone had painted gray to match the surrounding granite. Through this translucent layer of paint, I could see the darker, starker lines of an etched sigil, the characters on each stone together commanding immobility in the harshest gods’ pidgin and addressed to any living thing that tried to cross it. A shield, of sorts, and it should have worked. The Arameri on the steps had no fear of knives or arrows; their blood sigils could deflect such things easily. All they needed to fear were the mask-wielding assassins, whose strange magic could somehow circumvent their sigils. Keep them out of reach and the Arameri would be safe—so the scrivener corps had reasoned.

The busker staggered, then stopped as he reached the ring of stones. The mask swung from side to side, not in negation, and not with any movement that could be interpreted as human. I had seen gravel lizards do the same, swaying back and forth over a carcass.

Too late I remembered the simplistic literalness of scrivening magic. Any living thing, the stones commanded. But even if the busker’s heart still beat and his limbs still moved, that alone did not qualify as life. The mask had dimmed his soul to nothingness.

The busker stopped swaying, the rounded eyeholes fixed on a target. I followed its gaze and saw Shahar frozen at the top of the steps, her eyes wide and her expression still.

“Oh, demons,” I groaned, and ran for the steps as fast as I could.

The busker stepped closer to the sigil-stones.

“There!” cried Glee, pointing.

She could not have been talking to me. As the crowd’s cheers turned to screams and stamping became stampeding, Kitr appeared at the foot of the steps, just in front of the Arameri guard. A line of twelve glowing red knives appeared in the air before her, hovering and ready. I had seen her fling those knives through armies, leaving fallen mortals like scythed wheat. She could have done that here, risking the crowd to get her target, but like most of the godlings of the city, she would not. They had all taken an oath to respect mortal life. So she waited for the fleeing mortals to scatter more, giving her a clear shot.

I saw the danger before she did, for she had ignored the Arameri’s guards behind her. Faced with a strange godling and a mad mortal, they reacted to both. Half of them fired crossbows at the masked man; the other half fired at Kitr. This could not do her any lasting harm, but it did throw her off balance as her body jerked with the impact of the bolts. She recovered in an instant, shouting at them in fury—and as she did so, the masked man pushed past the barrier, as if the air had turned fleetingly to butter. Slowed, but not stopped.

I thought Kitr would miss her chance, distracted by the mortals. Instead she hissed, her form flickering for just an instant. In her place curled an enormous red-brown snake, its cobralike hood flared. Then she was a woman again, and the knives streaked at the man with the speed of spat poison, all twelve of them thudding into his body with such force that he should have been flung halfway to the city limits.

Instead he merely stopped for a moment, rocking back on his heels. That was the first evidence that the mask had its own protective magic. I saw a glimmer around the edges of his mask, against his skin, underneath. What was it doing? Strengthening his flesh, certainly, or Kitr’s knives would’ve torn it apart. Displacing the force of the blows. Before I could fathom it, the busker started forward again, running slower because of the knives in his thighs. But running.

And in that instant, a second masked man, this one bigger and heavier, raced out of the crowd and plowed into the guards from the side.

Two of them. Two of them.

Glee cursed. We were too far from the madness, going too slow as we fought our way through the panicked crowd. She grabbed my shoulder. “Get them to Sky!” she said, and flung me through the ether. Startled, I materialized atop the Salon steps, in front of an equally stunned cluster of Arameri and soon-to-be-Arameri eyes.

“Sieh,” said Shahar. She stared at me, oblivious to the chaos twenty steps away, and I knew in that instant that she still loved me.

“Get the hells out of here,” I snapped at her, stifling my fury at Glee. Why in heavens had she sent me? What could I do, with no useful magic? “Why are you just standing here? Go back to Sky, damn it!”

There was a crackle, and lightning arced up from somewhere within the crowd, twisting back down to strike the second masker and a handful of guards, who were flung away screaming. Idiot scriveners. Like the first masker, this one stumbled. Stopped. A moment later he lurched forward, his hands scrabbling for purchase on the steps until he could manage to run upright again.

The guards had had enough time to recoup, however. Wrath Arameri, a naked sword in his hand, swept past us at the head of twin lines of soldiers. One line split and converged around us to protect Remath and the rest of us. The other line Wrath directed to assist the guards at the foot of the steps. Wrath fell in at Remath’s side, daring to put a hand on her shoulder as he urged her back toward the daystone steps. Both maskers ran right into a thicket of pikes and swords. From the men’s reactions, however—or lack thereof—it was already clear the blows would only slow them down, not stop them or kill them. They were already dead.

“What in demons?” murmured Datennay Canru. I followed his gaze, and my mouth went dry: a third masker had appeared, this one on the steps of the nearby Itempan White Hall. He wore the uniform of an Order-Keeper, but unlike the first two, his mask was the deep splashy crimson of blood, with stylized white and gold designs and an open mouth that suggested a roar of vengeful fury. This man, too, began to run toward us—and with the crowd thinning and the guards occupied, nothing stood in his way.

Nothing but me.

“Oh gods, no,” I whispered. What could I do? En pulsed hot against the skin of my chest. I grabbed for it; then I remembered. En’s power was mine; when I was strong, so was it. But I was only mortal now. If I used En, drained the last of its strength…

No. I would not kill my oldest friend, not for this. And I would not let my new friends, even if one of them had betrayed me, die. I was still a god, damn it, even without magic. I was still the wind and caprice, even bound into dying flesh. I would fear no mere mortal, no matter how powerful.

So I bared my teeth and lashed the tail I no longer possessed. Shouting a challenge, I ran down the steps to meet the crimson masker.

My words had been in the First Tongue, a command, though I hadn’t expected the man to listen. But to my shock, the crimson masker stopped and turned toward me.

This mask was beautiful and horrid, the runnels and paint suggesting fouled rivers, the strange-angled eyes like crooked mountains. Its mouth—a stylized thing of lips and teeth with a dark pit of an opening beyond which I could not see its wearer’s face—was twisted, a wail of utmost despair. Murderer, its markings whispered to me, and suddenly I thought of all the evils I’d done during the Gods’ War. I thought of the evils I’d done since—sometimes at the Arameri’s bidding, sometimes out of my own rage or cruelty. Forgetting my own challenge amid crushing guilt, I stumbled to a halt.

I felt a jolt. Sudden restriction and pain. Blinking, I looked down and found that the man had made a blade of his hand and had thrust it into my body at the midriff, nearly up to the wrist.

I was still staring down at this when Dekarta reached me. He grabbed my arm and spoke without words, whipping his head in a wide, vicious arc. Sound and force flooded from his throat, a roar of denial powered by the living energy of his skin and blood and bone. Better than many gods could have done. Where the power struck the crimson-masked man, I saw it cancel the mask’s message. The mask split down the center with a faint crack, and an instant later he flew backward a good fifty feet, vanishing amid the fleeing crowd. I could not see precisely where he landed because then Deka’s power struck the steps of the Salon, which erupted, shattering into rubble and bursting upward in an arcing spray.

There could be no precision to such a strike. Guards and soldiers went flying, screaming, along with the enemy. Through all this I saw another white-masked man, one I hadn’t noticed, run into the barrier of broken, flying stone and tumble back. But as the dust and rubble returned to earth, he sat up.

Nemmer appeared swathed in shadows, facing me. I saw her eyes widen at the sight of my wound. Beyond her, I saw the fallen white-masked man get to his feet and come charging again, this time leaping with godlike strength over the channel of rubble that Deka had created. I willed a warning, since I could not muster the breath, and to my astonishment Nemmer seemed to hear me. She turned and met the man as he struck.

Then I was in Deka’s arms, being carried like a child, bump te bump te bump. It was nice that he was so much bigger than me. He ran up the steps to the rest of the Arameri party, who had finally—finally!—begun to hurry up the curving steps toward the nearer gate. From Deka’s embrace, I tried to shout at them to go faster, but I couldn’t lift my head. So strange. It was like my first day as a mortal, when Shahar had summoned me to this realm as the cat, or the day two thousand years before that, when Itempas had thrown me down in chains of flesh and given my leash to a woman, one of Shahar’s daughters, who looked equal parts horrified and elated at the power she held.

Then we reached the top of the steps, and the world folded into a blur, and I passed out in its rippling crease.

16

I see something I should not.

I see as gods do, absorbing all the world around us whether we have eyes to see it or ears to hear it or a body at all present. I know things because they happen. This is not a mortal thing, and it should not happen while I am in the mortal realm, but I suppose it is proof that I am not completely mortal yet.

We have reached Sky. The forecourt is chaos. The captain of the guard is shouting and gesturing at a gaggle of men who crossed the gate with us. Soldiers and scriveners are running, the former to surround the Vertical Gate with spears and swords in case the maskers follow, the latter bringing brushes and inkpots so that they can seal it off before that happens. While this occurs, Wrath and Ramina try to pull Remath into the palace, but she shakes them off. “I will not retreat in my own home,” she says, so the soldiers and scriveners make ready to defend her with their lives.

Amid all this running and shouting, I flop about in Deka’s arms, dying. Dying faster, that is, instead of the decades-long death that aging has imposed on me. The crimson masker has punched a hole through many of my organs and a good chunk of my spine. If I somehow survive, which is highly unlikely, I will never walk again. Yet my heart still beats, and my brain still fires sparks within its wrinkled meat, and as long as those things continue, there is an anchor for my soul to hold on to.

I’m glad it will be like this. I died protecting those I cared for, facing an enemy, like a god.

Deka has carried me off the Vertical Gate, onto the unblemished white daystone of Sky’s forecourt. He falls to his knees, shouting for someone to hold me, he can save me if he has help, help him, damn it.

It is Shahar who comes to her brother’s call. She kneels at my other side, and their long-awaited reunion is a quick and panicked meeting of eyes across the gore of my open belly. “Get his clothes open,” he commands, though she is the heir and he is nothing, just a fancy servant. (I am useless, aside from the part of me that watches. My eyes have rolled back in my head, and my mouth hangs open, ugly and inelegant. Some god.) While she struggles to lift my shirt—she tried to tear it first, thinking that would disturb the wound less, but the cheap material is surprisingly strong—Deka pulls a square of paper and a capped brush from wherever scriveners keep such things, and sketches a mark that means hold. He means for it to hold in my blood, hold back the filth that is already poisoning my body. That will give him time to write more sigils, which might actually heal me. (Has he only painted offensive magic into his skin? Silly boy.)

But as he completes the mark and reaches for me, putting his hand on Shahar’s to brace himself so that he can lay the sigil in place, something happens.

The universe is a living, breathing thing. Time, too. It moves, though not as mortals imagine. It is restless, twitchy. Mortals don’t notice because they’re restless and twitchy, too. Gods notice, but we learn to ignore these things early on, the same way mortal newborns eventually ignore the lonely silence of a world without heartbeats. Yet suddenly I notice everything. The slow, aeons-deep inhalation of the stars. The crackle of the sun’s power against this planet’s veil of life. The minute scratching of mites too small to see on Shahar’s pristine white skin. The lazy, buzzy jolt of hours and days and centuries.

And between them, beneath their hands, I open my eyes. My mouth opens. Am I shouting? I cannot hear the words. I reach up, my hands covering Shahar’s and Dekarta’s, and there is a flicker of something, like lightning, along their skins. Shahar gasps, her eyes going wide. Dekarta stares at her, opening his mouth to cry out.

There is a blurring. White lines, like the streaking of comets, run through the shapes of our flesh. It is like before, the watching-me realizes—like the time of our oath, when we touched and they made me mortal. But this is different. This time, when the power comes, it is not a wild concussion. There is a will at work: two wills, with one purpose. Something bursts within me and is funneled to a fine point.

Then

it

becomes

I flopped about in Deka’s arms, pissed. “Put me down, Maelstrom, damn you. I’m a god, not a sack of potatoes—”

He stumbled to a halt just beyond the Vertical Gate. A few paces ahead, Shahar had done the same. Eight of Captain Wrath’s men surrounded her, trying to hurry her into the palace as they had already done Remath, but she shook them off. “I will not retreat in my own—”

She paused. Deka did, too. He set me on my feet. I swept marble dust off my clothes and hair and straightened my clothing, and then froze.

Oh.

Oh.

I understood, and did not. Many combinations in existence had meaning, and meaning has always imbued power—whether purely of an existential nature, or materially, or magically. There were the Three, of course, omnipotent on the infinitely rare occasions that they worked together. Twins. Male and female. God and mortal and the demons between.

But there was no reason for this. No precedent. They’d changed the universe. A pair of mortals.

They’d changed the universe to heal me.

They had changed the universe.

I stared at them. They stared back. Around us the chaos continued. All the other mortals seemed oblivious to what had happened, which was unsurprising. To them, it hadn’t happened. There was no blood on the ground where I’d lain. My clothes weren’t torn, because there had never been a wound. If I tried to remember, my mind conjured a glimpse of the crimson masker, hand poised before the blow, flying backward as Deka’s blast of raw magic struck. But I could also remember the blow happening first.

A moment later Nemmer appeared, dropping something heavy to the ground. A body. I blinked. No, a masker; one of the white ones. Trussed up in what looked like huge writhing snakes formed of translucent shadow. This was Nemmer’s magic. The instant she appeared, half of Wrath’s soldiers moved to attack, and the other half realized the mistake and tried to stop them. There was a flurry of shouts and aborted lunges and then a great deal of confused milling. I suspected that if Wrath got through this day with his position intact, he would soon put his soldiers through a heavy training course on Gods, the Quick Recognition and Not Attacking Of.

“Got them,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. She glanced at me and grinned. “Tell your mortals to stand down, Sieh. The danger has passed.”

I stared at her, mute with shock. Her grin faltered. She glared at me, then snapped her fingers at my face. I jumped.

“What the hells is wrong with you?” Her smile turned vicious. “Were you so frightened by your first taste of mortal danger, big brother?”

I felt no real anger at her taunt because I had been in mortal danger a thousand times more than she had ever been. And I had far stranger things to occupy my thoughts.

But I was not the Trickster for nothing, and my mouth moved automatically while my brain continued to churn. “I was frightened by the incompetence I saw down there,” I snapped. “Did you plan to let them nearly achieve their goal, or were your much-vaunted professionals caught napping?”

Nemmer did not lose her temper, but it was a near thing. At least she stopped smiling. “There were ten of them,” she said, which broke some of my shock and brought me back to the present. “Counting the one your pet scrivener killed. All coming from different directions, all unstoppable—unless their bodies are completely destroyed or the masks are broken. You’re lucky only one got through. We weren’t prepared for a strike of this magnitude.”

Ten of them. Ten mortals, tricked into donning the masks and turning themselves into living weapons. I shook my head, sickened.

“All the mortals up here are fine?” She spoke in a neutral tone. We were back to the unspoken truce, then.

I looked around, noting Shahar and Dekarta standing together nearby, listening to our conversation. Not far beyond them was Canru, looking uncomfortable and alone. Across the courtyard, Remath had stopped on the steps and seemed to be arguing with Ramina. Wrath faced us, his hand on his sword hilt, his gaze riveted on the masked creature at Nemmer’s feet.

“The mortals who matter are fine,” I said, feeling weary and full of grief. Ten who did not matter had died. And how many soldiers and innocents among the crowd? “We are all fine.”

She looked uneasy at my wording but nodded, gesturing at the trussed-up man in the white mask. He was not dead; I saw him fighting the bonds, panting with the effort. “This one’s for you, then. I figure the scrivener boy might be able to figure out something about this magic. Mortals understand how mortals think better than I ever will.” She paused, then lifted her hand; something else appeared in it. “I’ll give you this, too. Be careful of the intact masks, but once they’re broken, the magic dies.”

She held it out: the broken halves of the crimson mask.

I felt hard fingers punch through my flesh.

I took the mask pieces from her.

“Got to go,” she said. She sounded just like a common mortal, right down to the Wesha accent. “Things to do, secrets to gather. We’ll talk soon.” With that, she vanished.

Remath was walking back, unhurried, as if she strolled through the aftermath of an attack on her family every day. While I could speak without her hearing, I went to Shahar and Dekarta, handing the pieces of the mask to Deka. He did not take them with his bare hands, quickly pulling his sleeves down to take the halves, gingerly, by the edges.

“Say nothing of what happened,” I said, speaking low and quickly.

“But—” Shahar began, predictably.

“No one remembers but us,” I said, and she shut up. Not even Nemmer, whose nature it was to sense the presence of secrets, had noticed anything. Dekarta caught his breath; he understood what this meant as well as I had. Shahar flicked a glance at him and at me, and then—as if she had not spent ten years apart from him, and as if she had not once broken my heart—she covered for us both, immediately turning to face her oncoming mother.

“The situation has been controlled,” she said as Remath drew to a halt before us. Wrath positioned himself directly between me and Remath, his hard brown gaze fixed on me. (I winked at him. He did not react.) Ramina remained behind her, his arms folded, showing no hint of relief that his son and daughter were alive and well.

“Lady Nemmer reported there were ten assailants in all,” Shahar continued. “Her organization captured the rest and will be conducting its own investigation. She would like mortal input, however.” With a look of distaste, Shahar glanced at the immobilized masker.

“How considerate of her,” said Remath, with only the faintest hint of sarcasm. “Wrath.” He flinched and left off glaring at me. “Return to the city and oversee the investigation there. Be certain to find out why so many of these creatures were able to make it through our lines.”

“Lady…” Wrath began. He glanced at me.

Remath lifted an eyebrow and faced me as well. “Lord Sieh. Are you planning to try and kill me again?” She paused, and added, “Today?”

“No,” I said, letting my voice and face show that I still hated her, because I was not an Arameri and I saw no point in hiding the obvious. “Not today.”

“Of course.” To my surprise, she smiled. “Do stay awhile, Lord Sieh, since you’re here. If I recall, you are prone to boredom, and I have plans of my own to set in motion, now that this unpleasantness has occurred.” She glanced at the masker again, and there was an odd sort of sorrow in her expression for the most fleeting of moments. If it had lasted, I might have begun to pity her. But then it vanished and she smiled at me and I hated her again. “I believe you will find the next few days most interesting. As will my children.”

While Shahar and I digested this in silence, Remath glanced at Deka, who stood just behind Shahar, his expression so neutral that he reminded me, at once, of Ahad. There was a long, silent moment. I saw Shahar, wearing her own careful mask, glance from one to the other.

“Not the homecoming you were expecting, I imagine.” Remath’s tone surprised me. She sounded almost affectionate.

Deka almost smiled. “Actually, Mother, I was expecting someone to try and murder me the instant I arrived.”

The look that crossed Remath’s face in that instant would have been difficult for anyone to interpret, mortal or immortal, if they were not familiar with Arameri ways. It was one of the ways they trained themselves to conceal emotion. They smiled when they were angry and showed sorrow when they were overjoyed. Remath looked wryly amused, skeptical of Deka’s apparent nonchalance, mildly impressed. To me her feelings might as well have been written into the sigil on her forehead. She was glad to see Deka. She was very impressed. She was troubled—or bitterly empathetic, at least—to see him so cold.

Shahar loved her. I wasn’t sure about Deka. Did Remath love either of her children back? That I could not say.

“I’ll see both of you tomorrow,” she said to Shahar and Dekarta, then turned and walked away. Wrath bowed to her back, then strode off with a final glance at us before raising his voice to call his men. Ramina, however, lingered.

“Interesting stylistic choice,” he said to Deka. As if in response to his words, a stray breeze lifted Deka’s black cloak behind him like a living shadow.

“It seemed fitting, Uncle,” Deka replied. He smiled thinly. “I am something of a black sheep, am I not?”

“Or a wolf, come to feast on tender flesh—unless someone tames you.” Ramina’s eyes drifted to Deka’s forehead, then to Shahar, in clear implication. Shahar’s brows drew down in the beginnings of a frown, and Ramina flashed a loving smile at both of them. “But perhaps you’re more useful with sharp teeth and killer instincts, hmm? Perhaps the Arameri of the future will need a whole pack of wolves.” And with this, he glanced at me. I frowned.

With studied boredom in her tone, Shahar said, “Uncle, you’re being even more obscure than usual.”

“My apologies.” He didn’t look apologetic at all. “I merely came to mention a detail about the meeting Sister asked that you attend tomorrow. She’s ordered full privacy—no guards, no courtiers beyond the ones invited. Not even servants will be present.”

At this, Shahar and Dekarta both looked at each other, and I wondered what in the infinite hells was going on. Remath should never have declared her intention for a private meeting in advance; too easy for other Arameri or interested parties to slip in a listening sphere. Or an assassin. But Ramina was marked with a full sigil; he could not act against his sister even if he wanted to. Which meant that he was speaking on Remath’s behalf. But why?

Then I realized Ramina was still looking at me. So it was something Remath wanted me to know, in particular. To make sure I’d be there.

“Damned twisty-headed Arameri,” I said, scowling at him. “I’ve had a horrid day. Say what you mean.”

He blinked at me with such blatant surprise that he fooled no one. “I should think it would be obvious, Trickster. The Arameri are about to implement a trick that should impress even you. Naturally we would welcome your blessing for such an endeavor.” With that, he smiled and strode after his sister.

I stared after him in confusion, as if that would help. It didn’t. And now I spied Morad approaching at the head of a phalanx of servants, all of them pausing to bow as Ramina walked past in the palace archway.

Shahar turned to me and Deka, speaking low and quickly. “I must attend to Canru and the Teman party down at the Salon; they’ll be very put out about this. Both of you, request quarters that can be reached through the dead spaces. Sieh knows what I mean.” With that, she, too, left us, heading over to join her fiancé.

“Are you all right?” I heard Canru ask her. I tightened my jaw against inadvertent approval and turned to Deka.

“I suppose you’ll want to settle in, too,” I said. “Order the scrivener corps about and start dissecting your new prize, or whatever it is you people do.” I looked over at the trussed-up masker.

“I’d much rather go somewhere and have a long talk with you about what just happened,” he said, and there was something in his voice, a smoothness, that made me blush inadvertently. He smiled, missing nothing. “But I suppose that will have to wait. I’ll be taking one of the spire rooms—Spire Seven, most likely, if it’s still available. Where will you be?”

I considered. “The underpalace.” There was no place more private in all of Sky. “Deka, the dead spaces—”

“I know what they are,” he said, surprising me, “and I can guess which room you’ll be in. We’ll come around midnight.”

Flustered, I watched Deka as he turned to greet Morad. I heard him issue orders as easily as if he had not just returned from a ten-year exile, and I heard Morad answer with, “At once, my lord,” as if she had never missed him.

All around the courtyard, everyone spoke with someone else. I stood alone.

Obscurely troubled, I went over to the masker and prodded him with a toe, sighing. He grunted and struggled toward me in response. “Why must all you mortals be so difficult?” I asked. The dead man, predictably, did not answer.

My old room.

I stood in the open doorway, unsurprised to see that it had not been touched in the century since I’d left. Why would any servant, or steward for that matter, have bothered? No one would ever want to dwell in a chamber that had housed a god. What if he’d left traps behind or woven curses into the walls? Worse, what if he came back?

The reality was that I had never intended to come back, and it had never occurred to me to weave curses into anything. If I had, I would never have burdened the walls with anything so trivial as a curse. I would have created a masterwork of pain and humiliation and despair from my own heart, and I would have forced any mortal who invaded the space to share those horrors. Just for a moment or two, rather than the centuries I endured, but none of it blunted.

An old wooden table stood on one side of the room. On its surface were the small treasures I had always loved to gather, even when they had no life or magic of their own. A perfect dried leaf, now probably too fragile to touch. A key; I did not remember what it opened or if its lock still existed. I just liked keys. A perfectly round pebble that I had always meant to turn into a planet and add to my orrery. I had forgotten about it after I’d gotten free, and now I had no power to correct the error.

Beyond the table was my nest—or so I had styled it, though it had none of the comfort or beauty of my true nest in the gods’ realm. This was just a pile of rags, gray and dry-rotted and dusty now, and probably infested with vermin to boot. Some of the rags were things I had stolen from the fullbloods: a favorite scarf, a baby’s blanket, a treasured tapestry. I’d always tried to take things they cared about, though they’d punished me for it whenever they’d caught me. Every blow had been worth it—not because the thefts caused them any great hardship, but because I was not a mortal, not just a slave. I was still Sieh, the mischievous wind, the playful hunter, and no punishment could ever break me. To remind myself of that, I had been willing to endure anything.

Dust and mite food now. I slid my hands into my pockets, sat down against a wall, and sighed.

I was dozing when they arrived, through the floor. Shahar, to my surprise, was the first one through. I smiled to see that she held a small ceramic tablet, on which had been drawn a single, simple command in our language. Atadie. Open. I had shown her the door, and she’d had someone make her a key.

“Have you been wandering the dead spaces by yourself these past few years?” I asked as she climbed out of the hole and dusted herself off. She or Dekarta had made steps out of the reshaped daystone. He came up behind her, looking around in fascination.

She looked at me warily, no doubt remembering that the last time I’d seen her, really spoken to her, had been two years before, the morning after we’d made love.

“Some,” she said, after a moment. “It’s useful to be able to go where I want with none the wiser.”

“Indeed it is,” I said, smiling thinly. “But you should be careful, you know. The dead spaces were mine once—and any place that was mine for so long is likely to have taken on some of my nature. Step into the wrong corridor, open the wrong door, and you never know what might jump out and bite you.”

She flinched, as I’d meant her to, and not just at my words. Betrayer, I let my eyes say, and after a moment she looked away.

Deka looked warily at us both, perhaps only now realizing how bad things were between us. Wisely, he chose not to mention it.

“There’s panic in Shadow,” he said, “and we’re getting reports of unrest from elsewhere in the world. There have been riots, and the Order has instituted extra services at all White Halls to accommodate the Itempans who suddenly feel compelled to pray. Mother’s called an emergency session of the Consortium in three days’ time, and she’s authorized the Litaria to facilitate travel by gate for all the representatives. Rumor has the Arameri all dead and a new Gods’ War impending.”

I laughed, though I shouldn’t have. Fear was like poison to mortals; it killed their rationality. Somewhere, there would be deaths tonight.

“That’s Remath’s problem, not mine,” I said, sitting forward, “or yours. We have a more significant concern.”

They looked at each other, then at me, and waited. Belatedly I realized they thought I was about to explain something.

“I haven’t got a clue what happened,” I said, raising my hands quickly. “Never seen anything like that in my life! But I have no idea why anything happens the way it does around you two.”

“It didn’t come from us.” Shahar spoke softly, with the barest hint of hesitation. I scowled at her and she blanched, but then tightened her jaw and lifted her chin. “We felt it, Deka and I, and this time you did, too. We have felt that power before, Sieh. It was the same as the day the three of us took our oath.”

Silence fell, and in it I nodded slowly. Trying not to be afraid. I had already guessed that the power was the same. What frightened me was my growing suspicion as to why.

Deka licked his lips. “Sieh. If the three of us touch, and it somehow causes this… this thing to occur, and if that power can be directed… Sieh, Shahar and I—” He took a deep breath. “We want to try it again. See if we can turn you back into a godling.”

I caught my breath, wondering if they had any idea of how much danger we were all in.

“No,” I said. I stood and stepped away from the wall, too tense to maintain my pose of indifference.

“Sieh—” Deka began.

“No.” Gods. They really had no idea. I turned and began to pace, nibbling a thumbnail. All that happened in darkness. Sky’s glowing halls had been designed specifically to thwart Nahadoth’s nature, and Itempas was diminished to mortality. Yeine, though… every creature that had ever lived could be her eyes and ears, if she so chose. Was she observing us now? Would she…?

“Sieh.” Shahar. She stepped in front of me and I stopped, because it was either that or run into her. I hissed, and she glared back. “You’re making no sense. If we can restore your magic—”

“They’ll kill you,” I said, and she flinched. “Naha, Yeine. If the three of us have that kind of power, they’ll kill us all.”

They both looked blank. I groaned and rubbed my head. I had to make them understand.

“The demons,” I said. More confusion. They did not know they were Ahad’s descendants. I cursed in three languages, though I made sure none of them were my own. “The demons, damn it! Why did the gods kill them?”

“Because they were a threat,” said Deka.

“No. No. Gods, do both of you only ever listen to teaching poems and priests’ tales? You’re Arameri; you know that stuff is all lies!” I glared at them.

“But that was why.” Deka was looking stubborn again, as he’d done as a child, as he’d probably done in every Litaria lesson since. “Their blood was poison to gods—”

“And they could pass for mortals, better than any god or godling. They could, and did, blend in.” I stepped closer and looked into his eyes. If I wasn’t careful, if I did not work hard to keep the years hidden, mortals were not fooled by my outward appearance. Now, however, I let him see all I had experienced. All the aeons of mortal life, all the aeons before that. I had been there nearly from the beginning. I understood things Deka would never comprehend, no matter how brilliant he was and no matter how diminished I became as a mortal. I remembered. So I wanted him to believe my words now, without question, the way ordinary mortals believed the words of their gods. Even if that meant making him fear me.

Deka frowned, and I saw the awareness come over him. And though he loved me and had wanted me since he was too young to know what desire meant, he stepped back. I felt a moment’s sorrow. But it was probably for the best.

Shahar, sweet, beautiful betrayer that she was, leapt to my point before her brother did.

“They made mortalkind a threat,” she said very softly. “They fit in among us, yes. Interbred with us. Passed on their magic, and sometimes their poison, to all their mortal descendants.”

“Yes,” I said. “And though it was the poison that was of immediate concern—one of my brothers died of demon poison, which set the whole thing off—there was also the fear of what would happen to our magic, filtered and distorted through a mortal lens. We saw that some of the demons were just as powerful as pure godlings.” I looked at Deka as I said it. I couldn’t help myself. He stared back at me, still shaken to discover that his childhood crush was something frightening and strange, oblivious to my real implication. “It wasn’t hard to guess that someday, somehow, a mortal might be born with as much power as one of the Three. The power to change reality itself on a fundamental level.” I shook my head and gestured around us, at the room, Sky, the world, the universe. “You don’t understand how fragile all this is. Losing one of the Three would destroy it. Gaining a Fourth, or even something close to a Fourth, would do the same.”

Deka frowned, concern overwhelming shock. “And what we did… you think the Three would see that as the culmination of their fears?”

“But it’s not as though we did anything harmful—” Shahar began.

“Changing reality is harmful! If you tried it again, even to help me—Deka, you understand how magic works. What happens if you misdraw a sigil or misspeak a godword? If the two of you try to use this power to remake me…” I sighed, and faced the truth I hadn’t wanted to admit. “Well, think of what happened last time. You wanted me to be your friend, a true friend—something that I could never have been as a god. You would have grown up and understood how different I was. You would have become proper Arameri and wondered how you could use me.” Now I looked at Shahar, whose lips tightened ever so slightly. “If I had stayed a god, our friendship would never have survived this long. So you, some part of you, made me into something that could be your friend.”

Deka took another step back, horror filling his face. “You’re saying we did this? The collapse of the Nowhere Stair, your mortality…?”

At this I sighed and went back to the wall, sliding down to sit against it. “I don’t know. This is all guesses and conjecture. Your will, if it had this strange magic behind it, may have focused the magic just enough to cause a change, but then it backlashed… or something. None of that answers the fundamental question of why you have this power.”

“It isn’t just us, Sieh.” Shahar again, quiet again. “Deka and I have touched many times, and nothing came of it. It’s only when we touch you that there’s any change.”

I nodded bleakly. I had figured that out as well.

Silence fell as they digested everything I’d said. It was broken by the loud grumbling of my empty belly and my louder yawn. At this, Dekarta shifted uncomfortably. “Why did you come here, Sieh? There are no servants this far down, and this room is… foul.” He looked around, his lip curling at the pile of ancient rags.

A foul place for a fouled god, I thought. “I like it here,” I said. “And I’m too tired to go anywhere else. Go away now, both of you. I need to rest.”

Shahar turned toward the hole in the floor, but Deka lingered. “Come with us,” he said. “Have something to eat, take a bath. There’s a couch in my new quarters.”

I looked up at him and saw the bravery of his effort. I had jarred his fantasies badly, but he would try, even now, to be the friend he’d promised to be.

You are the one who did this to me, beautiful Deka.

I smiled thinly, and he frowned at the sight.

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “Go on. Let’s all be ready to face your mother in the morning.”

So they left.

As the daystone of the floor resealed itself, I lay down and curled up to sleep, resigning myself to stiffness by morning. But as soon as I closed my eyes, I realized I was no longer alone.

“Are you really afraid of me?” asked Yeine.

I opened my eyes and sat up. She sat cross-legged in my old nest, dainty as always, beautiful even amid rags. The rags were no longer dry-rotted, however. I could see color and definition returning to what had been a gray mass and could hear the faint tightening of the thread fibers as they regained cohesion and strength. Along one of Yeine’s thighs, a line of barely visible mites had begun to crawl, vanishing over the rise of her flesh. Sent packing, I imagined, or she might be killing them. One never knew with her.

I said nothing in response to her question, and she sighed.

“I don’t care if mortals grow powerful, Sieh. If they do, and they threaten us, I’ll deal with that then. For now”—she shrugged—“maybe it’s a good thing that some of them have magic like this. Maybe that’s what they really need, power of their own, so they can stop being jealous of ours.”

“Don’t tell Naha,” I whispered. At this she sobered and grew silent.

After a moment, she said, “You used to come to me whenever we were alone.”

I looked away. I wanted to. But I knew better.

“Sieh,” she said. Hurt.

And because I loved her too much to let her think the problem was her, I sighed and got up and went over to the nest. Climbing into it brought back memories, and I paused for an instant, overwhelmed by them. Holding Naha on a moonless night—the one time he was safe from both Itempas and the Arameri—as he wept for the Three that had been. Endless hours I’d spent weaving new orbits for my orrery and polishing my Arameri bones. Grinding my teeth as another guard-captain, this one a fullblood and cruel, ordered me to turn over for him. (I had gotten his bones, too, in the end. But they had not made as good toys as I’d hoped, and eventually I’d tossed them off the Pier.)

And now Yeine, whose presence burned away the bad and burnished the good. I wanted to hold her so much, but I knew what would happen. It amazed me that she didn’t. She was so very young.

She frowned at me in puzzlement, reaching out to cup my cheek. My self-control broke, and I flung myself against her as I had done so many times, burying my face in her breast, gripping the cloth at the back of her vest. It felt so good, too, at first. I felt warm and safe and young. Her arms came around me, and her face pressed into my hair. I was her baby, her son in all but flesh, and the flesh didn’t matter.

But there is always a moment when the familiar becomes strange. It is always there, just a little, between any two beings who love one another as much as she and I. The line is so fine. In one moment I was her child, my head pillowed on her breast in all innocence. In the next I was a man, lonely and hungry, and her breasts were small but full. Female. Inviting.

Yeine tensed. It was barely perceptible, but I had been expecting it. With a long sigh I sat up, letting her go. When her eyes—troubled, uncertain—met mine, I turned away. I am not a complete bastard. For her, I would stay the boy that she needed and not the man I had become.

To my surprise, however, she caught my chin and made me look at her again.

“There is more to this than you being mortal,” she said. “More than you wanting to protect those two children.”

“I want to protect mortalkind,” I said. “If Naha finds out what those two can do…”

Yeine shook her head, and shook mine a little, refusing to be distracted. Then she searched my face so intently that I began to be afraid again. She was not Enefa, but…

“You’ve been with Nahadoth and many of your siblings,” she said. Her revulsion crawled along my skin like the evacuating mites. She was trying to resist it, and failing. “I know… things are different, for godkind.”

If she had only been older. Just a few centuries might have been enough to reduce the memory of her mortal life and her mortal inhibitions. I mourned that I would not have time to see her become a true god.

“I was Enefa’s lover, too,” I said softly. I did not look at her at first. “Not… not often. When Itempas and Nahadoth were off together, mostly. When she needed me.”

And because there would be no other time, I looked up at her and let her see the truth. You might have needed me, too, in time. You’re stronger than Naha and Tempa, but you’re not immune to loneliness. And I have always loved you.

To her very great credit, she did not recoil. I loved her more than ever for that. But she did sigh.

“I’ve felt no urge to have children,” she said, grazing her knuckles along my cheek. I leaned into her touch, closing my eyes. “With so many angry, damaged stepchildren already, it seems foolish to complicate matters further. But also…” I felt her smile, like starlight on my skin. “You are my son, Sieh. It makes no sense. I should be your daughter. But… that’s how I feel.”

I caught her hand and pulled it against my chest so she could feel my mortal heartbeat. I was dying; it made me bold. “If I can be nothing else to you, I am glad to be your son. Truly.”

Her smile turned sad. “But you want more.”

“I always want more. From Naha, from Enefa… even from Itempas.” I sobered at that, shifting to lie against her side. She permitted this, even though it had gone wrong before. A sign of trust. I did not abuse it. “I want things that are impossible. It’s my nature.”

“Never to be satisfied?” Her fingers played with my hair gently.

“I suppose.” I shrugged. “I’ve learned to deal with it. What else can I do?”

She fell silent for so long that I grew sleepy, warm and comfortable with her in the softness of the nest. I thought she might sleep with me—just sleep, nothing more—which I wanted desperately and no longer knew how to ask for. But she, goddess that she was, had other things in mind.

“Those children,” she said at last. “The mortal twins. They make you happy.”

I shook my head. “I barely know them. I befriended them on a whim and fell in love with them by mistake. Those are things children do, but for once I should have thought like a god, not a child.”

She kissed my forehead, and I rejoiced that there was no reticence in the gesture. “Your willingness to take risks is one of the most wonderful things about you, Sieh. Where would you and I be, if not for that?”

I smiled in spite of my mood, which I think was what she’d wanted. She stroked my cheek and I felt happier. Such was her power over me, which I had willingly given.

“They are not such terrible people to love,” Yeine said, her tone thoughtful.

“Shahar is.”

She pulled back a little to look at me. “Hmm. She must have done something terrible to make you so angry.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

She nodded, allowing me to sulk for a moment. “Not the boy, though?”

“Dekarta.” She groaned, and I chuckled. “I did the same thing! He’s nothing like his namesake, though.” Then I paused as I considered Deka’s body-markings, his determination to be Shahar’s weapon, and his relentless pursuit of me. “He’s Arameri, though. I can’t trust him.”

“I’m Arameri.”

“Not the same. It isn’t an inborn thing. You weren’t raised in this den of weasels.”

“No, I was raised in a different den of weasels.” She shrugged, jostling my head a little. “Mortals are the sum of many things, Sieh. They are what circumstance has made them and what they wish to be. If you must hate them, hate them for the latter, not the former. At least they have some say over that part.”

I sighed. Of course she was right, and it was nothing more than I had argued with my own siblings over the aeons, as we debated—sometimes more than philosophically—whether mortals deserved to exist.

“They are such fools, Yeine,” I whispered. “They squander every gift we give them. I…” I trailed off, trembling inexplicably. My chest ached, as though I might cry. I was a man, and men did not cry—or at least Teman men did not—but I was also a god, and gods cried whenever they felt like it. I wavered on the brink of tears, torn.

“You gave this Shahar your love.” Yeine kept stroking my hair with one hand, absently, which did not help matters. “Was she worthy of it?”

I remembered her, young and fierce, kicking me down the stairs because I’d dared to suggest that she could not determine her own fate. I remembered her later, making love to me on her mother’s orders—but how hungry she’d looked as she held me down and took pleasure from my body! I had not abandoned myself so completely with a mortal for two thousand years.

And as I remembered these things, I felt the knot of anger in me begin to loosen at last.

With a soft, amused chuckle, Yeine disentangled herself from me and sat up. I watched her do this wistfully. “Be a good boy and rest now. And don’t stay up all night thinking. Tomorrow will be interesting. I don’t want you to miss any of it.”

At this I frowned, pushing myself up on one elbow. She ran fingers through her short hair as if to brush it back into place. A hundred years and still so much the mortal: a proper god would simply have willed her hair perfect. And she did not bother to hide the smug look on her face as I peered at her now.

“You’re up to some mischief,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

“Indeed I am. Will you bless me?” She got to her feet and stood smirking with one hand on her hip. “Remath Arameri is as interesting as her children, is all I’ll say for now.”

“Remath Arameri is evil, and I would kill her if Shahar did not love her so.” As soon as I said this, however, Yeine raised an eyebrow, and I grimaced as I realized how much I had revealed—not just to her, but also to myself. For if I loved Shahar enough to tolerate her horror of a mother, then I loved Shahar enough to forgive her.

“Silly boy,” Yeine said with a sigh. “You never do things the easy way, do you?”

I tried to make a joke of it, though the smile was hard to muster. “Not if the hard way is more fun.”

She shook her head. “You almost died today.”

“Not really.” I flinched as she leveled A Look at me. “Everything turned out all right!”

“No, it didn’t. Or rather, it shouldn’t have. But you still have a god’s luck, however much the rest of you has changed.” She sobered suddenly. “A good mother desires not only her children’s safety, but also their happiness, Sieh.”

“Er…” I could not help tensing a little, wondering what she was going on about. She was not as strange as Naha, but she thought in spirals, and sometimes—locked in a mortal’s linear mind as I was—I could not follow her. “That’s good, I suppose….”

Yeine nodded, her face still as unfathomable thoughts churned behind it. Then she gave me another Look, and I blinked in surprise, for this one held a ferocity that I hadn’t seen from her in a mortal lifetime.

“I will see to it that you know happiness, Sieh,” she said. “We will do this.”

Not she and Naha. I knew what she meant the way I knew the Three merited capital-letter status. And though the Three had never joined in the time since her ascension, she was still one of them. Part of a greater whole—and when all three of them wanted the same thing, each member spoke with the whole’s voice.

I bowed my head, honored. But then I frowned as I realized what else she was saying. “Before I die, you mean.”

She shook her head, just herself again, then leaned over to put a hand on my chest. I felt the minute vibration of her flesh for just an instant before my dulled senses lost the full awareness of her, but I was glad for that taste. She had no heart, my beautiful Yeine, but she didn’t need one. The pulse and breath and life and death of the whole universe was a more than sufficient substitute.

“We all die,” she said softly. “Sooner or later, all of us. Even gods.” And then, before her words could bring back the melancholy that I’d almost shed, she winked. “But being my son should get you some privileges.”

With that she vanished, leaving behind only the cooling tingle of warmth where her fingers had rested on my chest and the renewed, clean rags of my nest. When I lay down, I was glad to find she’d left her scent, too, all mist and hidden colors and a mother’s love. And a whiff—no more than that—of a woman’s passion.

It was enough. I slept well that night, comforted.

But not before I’d disobediently lain awake for an hour or so, wondering what Yeine was up to. I could not help feeling excited. Every child loves a surprise.

“Thank you all for coming,” said Remath. Her eyes touched on each of us in turn: me, Shahar, Dekarta, and, oddly, Wrath and Morad, alone of Remath’s full court. The latter two knelt behind Shahar and Deka, conceding right of prominence to the fullbloods. Ramina was present, too, standing behind and to the left of Remath’s throne. I leaned against the wall nearby, my arms folded as I pretended boredom.

It was late afternoon. We’d expected Remath’s summons earlier in the day—in the morning, when she took her usual audience, or after that. But no one had come to fetch us, so Shahar and Deka had done whatever it was Arameri fullbloods did all day, and meanwhile I had slept until noon, mostly because I could. Morad, bless her, had sent brave servants to beard me in my lair with food and clothing, then bring me to Remath.

From the blocky stone chair that had been an Itempan altar before the Gods’ War, and that still smelled faintly of Shinda Arameri’s demon blood, Remath smiled at us.

“In light of yesterday’s disturbing events,” she said, “it seems the time has come to implement a plan that I hoped I would never need. Dekarta.” He twitched in surprise and looked up. “Your teachers at the Litaria assure me that you are without doubt the finest young scrivener they have ever graduated, and as my spies at the Litaria confirm your accomplishments, it appears this is not just toadying praise. This pleases me more than you can know.”

Dekarta stared at her in obvious surprise for a full second before answering. “Thank you, Mother.”

“Do not thank me yet. I have a task for you and Shahar, one that will take substantial time and effort, but upon which the family’s future will entirely depend.” She folded her legs and glanced at Shahar. “Do you know what that task is, Shahar?”

It had the feel of an old question. Perhaps Remath quizzed Shahar in this manner all the time. Shahar seemed unfazed by it as she lifted her head to reply.

“I’m not certain,” she said, “but I have suspicions, as my own sources have informed me of some very curious activities on your part.”

“Such as?”

Shahar narrowed her eyes, perhaps considering how much she wanted to divulge in front of the mixed audience. Then, bluntly, she said, “You’ve had parties examining remote locations around the world, and you’ve had several of the scriveners—in secret, on pain of death—researching the building techniques used to create Sky.” She glanced at me briefly. “Those that can be replicated with mortal magic.”

I blinked in surprise. Now that I hadn’t been expecting. When I frowned at Remath, I was even more disturbed to find her smiling at me, as if my shock pleased her.

“What in the heavens are you up to, woman?” I asked.

She ducked her eyes almost coyly, reminding me, suddenly, of Yeine. Remath had that same smug look Yeine had worn the evening before. I did not like being reminded that they were relatives.

“The Arameri must change, Lord Sieh,” she said. “Is that not what the Nightlord told us, on the day you and the other Enefadeh broke free from your long captivity? We have kept the world still too long, and now it twists and turns, reveling in sudden freedom—and risking its own destruction by changing too far, too fast.” She sighed, the smugness fading. “My spies in the north gave me a report last year that I did not understand. Now, having seen the power of these masks, I realize we are in far greater danger than I ever imagined….”

Abruptly she trailed off, falling silent, and for a breath-held moment there were hells in her eyes—fears and weariness that she had not let us see up to now. It was a stunning lapse on her part. It was also, I realized as she lifted her gaze to Shahar, deliberate.

“My spies have seen hundreds of masks,” she said softly. “Perhaps thousands. In nearly every High North nation there are dimyi artists; the northerners have been spreading knowledge of the form and nurturing youngsters with the talent for more than a generation. They sell them to foreigners as souvenirs. They give them to traders as gifts. Most people hang them on their walls as decoration. There is no way to know how many masks exist—in the north, on the islands, throughout Senm. Even in this city, from Sky to the Gray to Shadow beneath. No telling.”

I inhaled, realizing the truth of her words. Gods, I had seen the masks myself. On the walls of a tavern in Antema. In the Salon once, right below Sky, when I’d pretended to be the page of some noble in order to eavesdrop on a Consortium session. Stern, commanding faces arranged on a wall in the bathroom; they’d drawn my eye while I took a piss. I hadn’t known what they were then.

Remath continued. “I have, of course, requested the aid of the Order-Keepers in locating and neutralizing this threat. They have already begun searching homes and removing masks—without touching them,” she added, as Deka looked alarmed and had opened his mouth to speak. “We are aware of the danger.”

“No,” Deka said, and we all blinked in surprise. One did not interrupt the Arameri family head. “No one is aware of the danger, Mother, until we’ve had a chance to study these masks and understand how they work. They may function through more than contact.”

“We must nevertheless try,” she said. “If even one of those masks can turn an ordinary mortal into a nigh-unstoppable creature like the ones that attacked us yesterday, then we are already surrounded by our enemies. They need not muster soldiers, or train them, or feed them. They can create their army at any time, in any place, through whatever mechanism or spell they use to control the masks. And the defenses our scriveners have devised have proven woefully inadequate.”

“The corps have only now obtained examples of these masks in their undamaged state to study,” said Shahar. “It would seem too soon—”

“I cannot risk this family’s fortunes on uncertainties. We’ve lost too much already, relying on tradition and our reputation. We believed we were unassailable, even as our enemies winnowed our ranks.” She paused for a moment, a muscle flexing in her jaw, her eyes going dark and hard. “You will make stranger choices, Shahar, when the time comes for you to lead. Not for nothing did I give you our Matriarch’s name.” Her eyes flicked to Deka. “Though I know already that you have the strength to do what’s right.”

Shahar tensed, her eyes narrowing. In suspicion? Or anger? I cursed my paltry mortal awareness of the world.

Remath took a deep breath. “Shahar. With the aid of Dekarta, and our family’s most capable members, you are to oversee the preparation of a new home for the Arameri.”

Utter silence fell. I stared along with the rest of them. Unknowable Maelstrom, she’d actually sounded serious.

“A new palace?” Shahar did not bother to hide her incredulity. “Mother…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “I don’t understand.”

Remath extended a graceful hand. “It is very simple, Daughter. A new palace will soon be built for us—in a hidden location, far more defensible and isolated than Sky. Captain Wrath and the White Guard, Steward Morad, and any others whom you trust implicitly will reside in this new palace—alone, until such time as you can make it ready for the whole family. Unlike Sky, the location of this new palace shall be secret. Dekarta, you are to ensure that this remains the case, utilizing whatever magical means are at your disposal. Create new ones if you must. Ramina, you are to advise my children.”

I could see which people in the room had known about this by their reactions. Shahar’s eyes were bigger than En; so were Deka’s. Wrath’s mouth hung open, but Morad continued to watch Remath, impassive. So Remath had told her lover. And Ramina smirked at me; he, too, had known.

But it made no sense. The Arameri had built a new palace before, but only when the old one had been destroyed, thanks to Nahadoth and an especially stupid Arameri family head. The current Sky was fine, and safer than any location in the world, seated as it was within a giant tree. There was no need for this.

I stepped away from the wall, putting my hands on my hips. “And what orders do you have for me, Remath? Will you command me to hew the stones and lay the mortar for this new palace? After all, I and my siblings built this one.”

Remath’s gaze settled on me, inscrutable. She was silent for so long that I actually began to wonder if she would try to kill me. It would be utterly stupid on her part; nothing short of the Maelstrom would be able to stop Nahadoth’s fury. But I put nothing past her.

Try me, I thought at her, and bared my teeth in a grin. En pulsed on my breast in hot agreement. At my smile, however, Remath nodded slightly, as if I’d confirmed something.

“You, Lord Sieh,” she began, “are to look after my children.”

I froze. Then, before I could muster a thought, Shahar sprang to her feet, abandoning protocol. Her hands were fists at her sides, her expression suddenly fierce. She rounded on all of us.

“Out,” she said. “Now.”

Wrath alone looked at Remath, who said nothing. Ramina and Morad held still for a breath, perhaps also waiting to see if Remath would counter Shahar’s command, but they carefully did not look at either woman. It was never wise to take sides in a battle between the head and heir. As soon as it was clear that Remath would not intervene, they left. The chamber’s heavy doors swung shut with an echoing silence.

Shahar glared at Dekarta, who had gotten to his feet as well but remained where he was, his face set and hard. “No,” he said.

“How dare you—”

“Mark me,” he snapped, and she flinched, silent. “Put a true sigil on me, geld me like Ramina. Do this if you want me to obey. Otherwise, no.”

Shahar’s lips tightened so much that I saw them turn white under the rouge. She was angry enough to say the words—in front of Remath, who might not let her take them back. Fools, her and Deka both. They were too young to play this game yet.

With a sigh I strode forward, stopping between and to one side of them. “You took the oath to each other as well,” I said, and they both glared at me. If Remath had not been there, I would have cuffed them like the squabbling brats they were, but for the sake of their dignity, I merely glared back.

With a dismissive hmmph, Shahar turned her back on us, striding up to the foot of the dais that held her mother’s chair. She stopped when they were eye to eye.

“You will not do this,” she said, her voice low and tight. “You will not make plans for your own death.”

Remath sighed. Then, to my surprise, she stood and walked down the steps until she stood before Shahar. They were of a height, I saw. Shahar might never be as full in breast or hip, but she did not turn aside as her mother drew near, her gaze clear and angry. Remath looked her up and down and slowly, smiled.

Then she embraced Shahar.

I gaped. So did Deka. So did Shahar, who stood stiff within her mother’s arms, her face a study in shock. Remath’s palms pressed flat against Shahar’s back. She even rested her cheek on Shahar’s shoulder, closing her eyes for just a moment. At last, with a reluctance that could not be feigned, she spoke.

“The Arameri must change,” she said again. “This is too little, and perhaps too late—but you have always had my love, Shahar. I am willing to admit that, here, in front of others, because that, too, is part of the change we must make. And because it is true.” She pulled back then, her hands lingering on Shahar’s arms until distance forced her to let go. I had the sense that she would have preferred not to. Then she glanced at Deka.

Deka’s jaw flexed, his hands clenching into fists at his sides, and though I doubt anyone else saw it, the marks on his body, beneath his clothing, flared in black warning. Remath would get no welcome there. She sighed, nodding to herself as if she’d expected nothing more. Her sorrow was so plain that I didn’t know what to think. Arameri did not show their feelings so honestly. Was this some sort of trick? But it did not feel like one.

Her eyes fell on me then, and lingered. Uneasily I wondered if she would try to hug me, too. If she did, I decided I would goose her.

“You will not distract me, Mother,” Shahar said. “Are you mad? Another palace? Why are you sending me away?”

Remath shook off the moment of candor, her face resuming its usual family head mask. “Sky is an obvious and valuable target. Anyone who wants to damage Arameri influence in the world knows to come here. Just one masked assassin through the Gate would be sufficient; even if no one is harmed, the fact that our privacy can be breached would show our every potential enemy that we are vulnerable.” She turned away from us, heading over to the windows, and sighed at the city and mountains beyond. A branch of the Tree arced away, miles long. The blossoms had begun to disintegrate, the Tree’s time of flowering having ended. Petals floated away from the branch, dancing along an air current in a winding trail.

“And our enemies include a god,” she said. “So we must take radical steps to protect ourselves, for the world still needs us. Even if it thinks otherwise.” She glanced back at us over her shoulder. “This is a contingency, Shahar. I have no intention of dying anytime soon.”

Shahar—stupid, gullible girl—actually looked relieved.

“That’s all well and good,” I said, rolling my eyes, “but building a secret palace is impossible. You’ll need workers, crafters, suppliers, and unless you mean for Shar and Deka to scrub their own toilets, servants. You don’t exactly have enough of those to go around here in Sky, so that means hiring locals from wherever your new palace is situated. There’s no way to keep a secret with that many people involved, even with magic.” Then it occurred to me how she could keep the secret. “And you can’t have them all murdered.”

Remath lifted an eyebrow. “I could, actually, but as you’ve guessed, that would leave its own trail of questions to be answered. Such crimes are more difficult to hide these days.” She nodded sardonically to me, and I smiled bitterly back, because once it had been my job to help erase the evidence of Arameri atrocities.

“In any case,” Remath said, “I have found another way.”

Beyond the windows, the sun had begun to set. It hadn’t touched the horizon yet, and there were still a good twenty minutes or so to go before twilight officially began. This, I would later realize, when I recovered from the shock, was why Remath murmured a soft prayer of apology before she spoke aloud.

“Lady Yeine,” she said, “please hear me.”

My mouth fell open. Shahar gasped.

“I hear,” Yeine said, appearing before us all.

And Remath Arameri—head of the family that had remade the world in Bright Itempas’s name, great-granddaughter of a man who had thrown Enefa’s worshippers off the Pier for fun, many-times-great-granddaughter of the woman who had brought about Enefa’s death—dropped to one knee before Yeine, with her head bowed.

I went over to Remath. My eyes were defective; they had to be. I leaned closer to peer at her but detected no illusion. I hadn’t mistaken someone else for her.

I looked up at Yeine, who looked positively gleeful.

“No,” I said, stunned.

“Yes,” she replied. “A fine trick, wouldn’t you say?”

Then she turned to Shahar and Dekarta, who kept looking from her to their mother and back at Yeine. They didn’t understand. I didn’t want to.

“I will build your new palace,” she said to all of us. “In exchange, the Arameri will now worship me.”

17

It was simple, really.

The Arameri had served Itempas for two thousand years. But Itempas was now useless as a patron, and Yeine was family, of a sort. I suppose that was how Remath rationalized it to herself—if she’d needed to. Perhaps it had been nothing more than pragmatism for her. Devout Arameri had always been rare. In the end, all most of them truly believed in was power.

We would travel to the site of the new palace at dawn, Remath told us. There Yeine would build it according to Remath’s specifications, and the Arameri would enter a new era in their long and incredible history.

I exited the audience chamber with the rest of them, leaving Remath and Yeine alone to discuss whatever family heads discussed with their new patron goddesses. Wrath, Morad, and Ramina, who had waited in the corridor outside, were called in as Shahar, Deka, and I left, probably to make their obeisance to Yeine as well. No doubt they would have tasks to complete by morning, as they would be traveling to the new palace with us. We would also take a minimal complement of guards, courtiers, and servants, because—according to Remath—we would need no more than that to establish ourselves. Shahar and Deka, respectively, were to choose those members of the family and the various corps who would accompany us. Unspoken in all of this was the fact that anyone who traveled to the new palace, for reasons of secrecy, might never be permitted to return.

I informed Shahar that I had business in Shadow for a few hours and left. The Vertical Gate had been reconfigured in the days since the attack. Now it was set by default to transport in one direction only—away from the palace—and returning required a password sent via a special messaging sphere, which I was given as I prepared to leave. The scrivener on duty, who stood among the soldiers guarding the gate, solemnly reminded me not to lose the sphere, because I would be killed by magic the instant I stepped onto the Gate without it, or killed by the soldiers should I survive and somehow manage the transit, anyway. I made sure I didn’t lose the sphere.

That done, I traveled to South Root, where I notified first Hymn and then Ahad that I would be staying at Sky for the time being.

Hymn was more subdued about this than I’d expected, though her parents were plainly overjoyed to see the back of me. Hymn said little as she helped me pack my meager belongings; everything I owned fit into a single cloth satchel. But when I turned to go, she caught my hand and pressed two things into it. The first was a glass knife, the same faded-leaves color as my eyes. She had clearly worked on it for some time; the blade had been polished to mirror smoothness, and she’d even managed to fit it with a brass kitchen-knife handle. The other thing she gave me was a handful of tiny beads in different sizes and colors, each made from glass or polished stone, each etched with infinitesimal lines of clouds or continents. They had holes bored through them to go onto my necklace alongside En.

“How did you know?” I asked as she spilled them into my hand.

“Know what?” She looked at me as though I’d gone mad. “I just remembered that old rhyme about you. About how you stole the sun for a prank? I figured, suns need planets, don’t they?”

Pathetic, compared to my lost orrery. Magnificent, given the love that had gone into making them. She turned away when I clutched them to my chest, though I managed—just—not to cry in front of her.

Ahad was in an odder state when I found him at the Arms of Night. As it was afternoon at the time, and the house was about to open for its usual leisurely business, I had expected to find him in his offices. He was on the back porch, however, and instead of his usual cheroot, he held a plucked flower, turning it contemplatively in his fingers. By the troubled expression on his face, the contemplations were not going well.

“Good,” was all he said when I informed him that I was moving back to Sky, and that the Arameri had become Yeinans instead of Itempans, and that, by the way, there was going to be a new palace somewhere.

“Good? That’s all you have to say?”

“Yes.”

I thought of the half-dozen slurs and insults he should’ve thrown at me in place of that quiet affirmative, and frowned. Something was wrong. But I could not exactly ask him whether he was all right. He would laugh at my attempted concern.

So I tried a different tack. “They’re yours, you know. Shahar, Dekarta. Your grandchildren. Great-grand, actually.”

This, at least, drew his attention. He frowned at me. “What?”

I shrugged. “I assume you slept with T’vril Arameri’s wife before you left Sky.”

“I slept with half of Sky before I left. What does that have to do with anything?”

I stared at him. “You really don’t know.” And here I’d thought he’d done it as part of some scheme. I frowned, putting my hands on my hips. “Why the hells did you leave Sky anyhow? Last I saw, you were on the brink of being adopted into the Central Family, maneuvering your way toward becoming the next family head. A bare century later, you’re a whoremonger, living among the commonfolk in the seediest part of town?”

His eyes narrowed. “I got tired of it.”

“Got tired of what?”

“All of it.” Ahad looked away now, toward the center of town—and the great omnipresent bulk of the World Tree, a brown and green shadow limned by the slanting afternoon sun. Almost hidden in the first crotch of the trunk was a glimmer of pearlescent white: Sky.

“I got tired of the Arameri.” Ahad turned the flower again. It looked like something common—a dandelion, one of the few flowers that still bloomed in Shadow’s dimness. He’d apparently plucked it from between the walkway stones that led up to the back door. I wondered why he was so fascinated by it. “T’vril married a fullblood to cement his rule. She was his third cousin on his father’s side or something. Didn’t give a damn about him, and the feeling was mutual. I seduced her on behalf of a branch family from outside Sky; they wanted their own girl married to T’vril instead. I needed the capital to boost my investments. So I took the money that they offered and made sure he found out about the affair. He wasn’t even upset.” His lip curled.

I nodded, slowly. It amazed me that it had taken so much for him to understand. “Not much different from what you did when we were slaves.”

Ahad’s glare was sharp and dangerous. “It was by my choice. That makes all the difference in the world.”

“Does it?” I leaned against one of the porch columns, folding my arms. “Being used one way or another—does it really feel all that different?”

He fell silent. That, and the fact that he’d left Sky afterward, was answer enough. I sighed.

“T’vril’s wife must’ve been pregnant when you left.” I would look up the timing when I got back to Sky, though that was hardly necessary. Deka was all the evidence that mattered.

“I can’t have children.” He said it wearily, with the air of something often repeated. Did so many women want his bitter, heartless seed? Amazing.

“You couldn’t,” I said, “not while there was no goddess of life and death. Not while you were part of Naha, just a half-time reflection of him. But Yeine made you whole. She gave you the gift that gods lost when Enefa died. We all regained it when Yeine took Enefa’s place.” Except me, I did not add, but he already knew that.

Ahad frowned at the flower that dangled in his fingers, considering. “A child…?” He let out a soft chuckle. “Well, now.”

“A son, I’m told.”

“A son.” Was there regret in his voice? Or just a different sort of apathy? “Come unknown and gone already.”

“A demon, you fool,” I said. “And Remath, Shahar, and Dekarta are probably demons as well.” How far removed from a godly forbear did mortals have to be before their blood lost its deadly potency? Shahar and Dekarta were one-eighth god, and their blood had not killed me. Could only a few generations make such a difference? We had all overestimated the danger of the demons, if that was the case—but then, no god would ever have been stupid enough to sample a possible demon’s blood and find out.

Ahad chuckled again. This time it was low and malicious. “Are they, now? From god-enslavers to god-killers. The Arameri are so endlessly interesting.”

I stared at him. “I will never understand you.”

“No, you won’t.” He sighed. “Keep me apprised on everything. Use the damned messaging sphere I gave you; don’t just play with it or whatever it is you do.”

As this was positively friendly by his standards, and I was tired of the flower silliness, I finally gave in to my curiosity. “You all right?”

“No. But I’m not interested in talking about it.”

Ordinarily I would have left him to his brooding. But there was something about him in that moment—a peculiar sort of weight to his presence, a taste on the air—that intrigued me. Because he wasn’t paying any attention to me, I touched him. And because he was so absorbed in whatever he was thinking about, he allowed this.

A lick of something, like fire without pain. The world breathed through both of us, quickening—

At this point, Ahad noticed me and knocked my hand away, glaring. I smiled back. “So you’ve found your nature?”

His glare became a frown so guarded that I couldn’t tell whether he was confused or just annoyed again. Had I guessed correctly, or had he not realized what he was feeling? Or both?

Then something else occurred to me. I opened my mouth to breathe his scent, tasting the familiar disturbed ethers as best I could with my atrophied senses. Particularly around that flower. Yes, I was sure.

“Glee’s been here,” I said, thoughtful. She had worn the flower in her hair, to judge by the scent. I could tell more than that, actually—such as the fact that she and Ahad had recently made love. Was that what had him in such a mood? I held off on teasing him about this, however, because he already looked ready to smite.

“Weren’t you going somewhere?” he asked, pointedly and icily. His eyes turned darker, and the air around us rippled in blatant warning.

“Back to Sky, please,” I said, and before I finished the sentence, he’d thrown me across existence. I chuckled as I detached from the world, though he would hear it and my laughter would only piss him off. But Ahad had his revenge. I appeared ten feet above the daystone floor, in one of the most remote areas of the underpalace. The fall broke my wrist, which forced me to walk half an hour for a healing script from the palace scriveners.

There had been no progress on determining who had sent the assassins, the scriveners informed me in terse, monosyllabic responses when I questioned them. (They had not forgotten that I’d killed their previous chief, but there was no point in my apologizing for it.) They were hard at work, however, determining how the masks functioned. In the vast, open laboratory that housed the palace’s fifty or so scriveners, I could see that several of the worktables had been allocated to the crimson mask pieces, and an elaborate framework had been set up to house the white mask. I did not see the mortal to whom the white mask had been attached, but it was not difficult to guess his fate. Most likely the scriveners had the corpse somewhere more private, dissecting it for whatever secrets it might hold.

Once my wrist was done, I returned to my quarters and stuffed the clothes and toiletries Morad had given me into Hymn’s satchel and was thus packed.

The sun had set while I did my business in Shadow. Night brought forth Sky’s glow in unmarked stillness. I left my room, feeling inexplicably restless, and wandered the corridors. I could have opened a wall, gone into the dead spaces, but those weren’t wholly mine anymore; I did not want them now. The servants and highbloods I passed in the corridors noticed me, and some recognized me, but I ignored their stares. I was only one murderous god, and a paltry one at that. Once, four had walked the halls. These mortals didn’t know how lucky they were.

Eventually I found myself in the solarium, the Arameri’s private garden. It was a natural thing to follow the white-pebbled path through the manicured trees. After a time I reached the foot of the narrow white spire that jutted up from the palace’s heart. The stairway door was not locked, as it had normally been in the old days, so I climbed the tight, steep twist of steps until I emerged onto the Altar—the flattened, enclosed top of the spire where, for centuries, the Arameri had conducted their Ritual of Succession.

Here I sat on the floor. Countless mortals had died in this chamber, spending their lives to wield the Stone of Earth and transfer the power of gods from one Arameri generation to the next. The spire was empty now, as dusty and disused as the underpalace. I supposed the Arameri did their successions elsewhere. The hollow plinth that had once stood at the center of the room was gone, shattered on the day Yeine and the Stone became one. The crystal walls had been rebuilt, the cracked floors repaired, but there was a still lifelessness to the room that I did not remember feeling during the days of my incarceration.

I pulled En off its chain and set it on the floor before me, rolling it back and forth and remembering what it had felt like to ride a sun. Aside from that, I thought of nothing. Thus I was as ready as I could have been when the daystone floor suddenly changed, brightening just a little. The room felt more alive, too.

He had always had that effect, in the old days.

I looked up. The glow of the daystone made for a nice reflection in the glass, so it was easy to see the two figures behind me: Glee and someone the same height. Broader. Male. Glee nodded to me in the reflection, then vanished, leaving the two of us alone.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello, Sieh,” said Itempas.

I waited, then smiled. “No ‘It’s been a while,’ or ‘You’re looking well’?”

“You aren’t looking well.” He paused. “Does it seem a long time to you?”

“Yes.” It wouldn’t have, before I’d turned mortal. He had been mortal for a century himself, though; he understood.

Footsteps, heavy and precise, approached me from behind. Something moved on the periphery of my vision. For an instant I thought he would sit beside me, but that would have been too strange for both of us. He walked past me and stopped at the edge of the Altar, gazing through the glass at the night-dark, branch-shrouded horizon beyond.

I gazed at his back. He wore a long leather coat that had been bleached almost white. His white hair was long, too, twisted into a heavy mane of thick cords, like Teman cable-locks but bare of ornamentation other than a clasp that kept them neat and controlled. White trousers and shirt. Brown boots. I found myself perversely pleased that he’d been unable to find boots in white.

“I will, of course, accept Nahadoth’s offer,” he said. “If it is within my power to heal you, or at least stop your aging, I will do all I can.”

I nodded. “Thanks.”

He returned the nod. Though he faced the horizon, his eyes were on me in the glass reflection. “You intend to stay with these mortals?”

“I suppose. Ahad wants me to keep him informed of what the Arameri are doing.” Then I remembered. “Of course, you’re Ahad’s boss, so…”

“You may stay.” His gaze was intent, lacking none of its old power despite his mortal condition. “And you should stay, to be near the mortals you love.”

I frowned at him. His eyes flicked away from mine. “Their lives are too brief,” he added. “One should not take that time for granted.”

He meant Glee’s mother. And perhaps the first Shahar Arameri, too. He had loved her despite her obsessive, destructive madness.

“How do you feel about the Arameri dumping you?” I asked, a bit nastily. I didn’t have the energy for real nastiness. I was just trying to change the subject.

I heard the creak of leather and the rasp of hair as he shrugged. “They are mortal.”

“No tears shed, hmm?” I sighed, lying back on the stone and stretching my arms above my head. “The whole world will follow them, you know, and turn away from you. It’s already happening. Maybe they’ll keep calling it the Bright, but it’ll really be the Twilight.”

“Or the Dawn.”

I blinked. Something I hadn’t considered. That made me sit up on one elbow and narrow my eyes at him. He stood the way he always had: legs apart, arms folded, motionless. Same old Dayfather, even in mortal flesh. He did not change.

Except.

“Why did you allow Glee Shoth to live?” I asked.

“For the same reason I allowed her mother to live.”

I shook my head in confusion. “Oree Shoth? Why would you have killed her?” I scowled. “She wouldn’t put up with your shit, is that it?”

If I hadn’t been watching him in the glass, I would never have believed what I saw. He smiled. “She wouldn’t, no. But that wasn’t what I meant. She was also a demon.”

This rendered me speechless. In the silence that fell, Itempas finally turned to me. I flinched in shock, even though he looked the same as the last time I’d seen him, apart from the hair and the clothes. And yet something about him—something I could not define—was different.

“Do you plan to kill Remath Arameri and her children?” he asked.

I stiffened. He knew. I said nothing, and he nodded, point made.

Suddenly I was full of nervous tension. I got to my feet, shoving En into a pocket. The Altar was too small for real pacing, but I tried anyway, walking over to him—and then I stopped, seeing my own reflection beside his in the glass. He turned, too, following my gaze, and we looked at ourselves. Me, short and wiry and defensive and confused. I had developed a slouch in my manifest maturity, mostly because I did not like being so tall. Him: big and powerful and elegant, as he had always been. Yet his eyes were so full of knowing and yearning that almost, almost, I wanted him to be my father again.

Almost, almost, I forgave him.

But that could not be, either. I hunched and looked away. Itempas lowered his eyes, and a long, solid silence formed in the enclosed space.

“Tell Glee to come back and get you,” I said at last, annoyed. “I’ve said all I’m going to say.”

“Glee is mortal, and I have no magic. We cannot speak as gods do; we must use words. And actions.”

I frowned. “What, then, you’re staying here?”

“And traveling with you to the new palace, yes.”

“Yeine will be here, too.” At this I clenched my fists and resumed pacing, in tight angry arcs. “Oh, but you must know that. You came here for her.” The two of them, entwined, his lips on the nape of her neck. I forced this image from my mind.

“No. I came for you.”

Words. Actions.

Both meaningless. They should not have made my throat clench the way they did. I fought them with anger, glaring at his back. “I could call Naha. I could ask him to kill you over and over, until you beg to truly die.” And because I was a brat, I added, “He’ll do it, too, for me.”

“Is that truly what you wish?”

“Yes! I’d do it myself if I could!”

To my surprise, Itempas pivoted and came toward me, opening his coat. When he reached into one of the inner-breast pockets, I tensed, ready to fight. He pulled out a sheathed dagger, and I grabbed for En. But then he handed the dagger to me, hilt-first. It was a small, light thing, I found when I took it; a child’s weapon, in those parts of the world where mortals gave their children sharp toys. Not altogether different from the dagger I’d used to damage Shahar’s innocence, ten years before—except this dagger was strapped securely into the leather sheath, held in place by a loop about the guardpiece. No one would be able to draw this blade by accident.

As I turned the thing in my fingers, wondering why in his own name Itempas had given it to me, my nose caught the faint whiff of old, dried blood.

“A gift from Glee,” he said. “To me. If death ever becomes preferable to living.”

I knew what it was, then. The gift of mortality, Enefa had called it. Glee’s blood was on the knife—her terrifying, poisonous demon blood. She had given Itempas a way out of his imprisonment, if he ever found the courage to take it.

My hand clenched convulsively around the knife’s hilt. “If you ever use this, the mortal realm will die.”

“Yes.”

“Glee will die.”

“If she hasn’t already died by then, yes.”

“Why would she give this to you?”

“I don’t know.”

I stared at him. He wasn’t being deliberately obtuse. He must have asked her. Either he hadn’t believed her answer, or—more likely, given how much she’d taken after him—she hadn’t bothered to answer. And he had accepted her silence.

Then he knelt before me, flicking his coat behind himself in the process, so that it spread out gracefully along the white stone floor. He lifted his head, too, partly because he was an arrogant son of a demon and partly to give me easy access to his chest and throat. Such a handsome, proud offering.

“Bastard,” I said, clenching my fist around the knife hilt. Death. I held the death of the universe in my fist. “Arrogant, selfish, evil bastard.”

Itempas merely waited. The knife was small, but I could angle it just so, get it between the ribs easily to prick his heart. Hells, if Oree Shoth had been a demon, too, then her daughter was more than half god. Even a scratch tainted with her blood might do the trick.

I unfastened the loop, but my fingers were shaking. When I took the hilt in my hand to draw it, I couldn’t. My hands just wouldn’t move. Eventually I let them—and the dagger—drop to my sides.

“If you want me to die—” he began.

“Shut up,” I whispered. “Shut up, gods damn you. I hate you.”

“If you hate me—”

“Shut up!” He fell silent, and I cursed and threw the dagger to the floor between us. The sound of leather on daystone made an echoing crack from the chamber’s walls. I had begun to cry. I raked my hands through my hair. “Just shut up, all right? Gods, you’re so insufferable! You can’t make me choose something like that! I’ll hate you if I damn well please!”

“All right.” His voice was soft, soothing. Against my will, I remembered times—rare but precious—when we had sat together in his placid realm, watching time dance. I had always been conscious of the fact that he and I would never be friends. Lovers was out of the question. But father and son? That much we could do.

“All right, Sieh,” he said now, so gently. He did not change. “Hate me if you like.”

The urge to love him was so powerful that I shook with it.

I turned and stormed over to the stair entrance, trotting down the steps. When I looked up, just before my head passed beyond the floor’s threshold, I saw Itempas watching me. He had not picked up the knife. He had, however, changed: his face was wet with tears.

I ran. I ran. I ran.

The door to Deka’s apartment was not locked. No servant would invade his privacy unannounced, and no highblood would come near him as yet. He was an unknown commodity. His family feared him, as he’d wished. I should have, too, because he was more powerful than me, but I had always loved strong people.

He rose from the worktable at which he’d been sitting—not a standard furniture item in Sky. Already he’d made changes. “Who the—Sieh?” He looked exhausted. He’d been up most of the night before, working with the scrivener corps to examine the assassins’ masks. Yet here he was, barefoot and tunicless, hair mussed, still awake. I saw sketches on several scrolls and a stack of sheets marked with the Litaria’s official sigil. Personnel for the new palace, perhaps. “Sieh, what…?”

“There’s no need to fear me,” I said, coming around the worktable at him. I held his eyes as I would those of any prey. He stared back. So easy to catch them when they wanted to be caught. “I may be older than the world, but I’m also just a man; no god is ever only one thing. If the whole of me frightens you, love whichever part you like.”

He flinched, confusion and desire and guilt all rising and sinking out of sight in his face. Finally he sighed as I reached him. His shoulders slumped a little in defeat. “Sieh.”

So much meaning in that one word. The wind, but also lightning, and need as raw as an open wound. I put my arms around him. The power written into his skin pulsed once, whispering warningly to me of pain and slaughter. I pressed my face to his shoulder and clenched my fists on the back of his shirt, wishing it was gone so I could touch those deadly marks.

“Sieh…” Deka began. He’d gone stiff at my embrace, holding his arms out as if afraid to touch me. “Sieh, gods—”

“Just let me do this,” I breathed into his shoulder. “Please, Deka.”

His hands landed on my shoulders, too light, hesitant. That wouldn’t do. I pulled him harder against me and he made a soft, strained sound. Then his arms slid around me, tightening. I felt the scrape of nails through my shirt. His face pressed into my hair. A hand cupped the back of my neck.

There was a time of stillness. It wasn’t long, because nothing in the mortal realm lasts long. It felt long, however, which was all that really mattered.

When I’d finally had enough, I pulled back and waited for the questions. Mortals always asked questions. Why did you come here? would be first, I was certain, because he wanted me and probably hoped that I wanted him. That wasn’t it at all, but I would tell him what he wanted to hear.

A long, awkward silence fell. Deka fidgeted and said, “I need at least a few hours of sleep.”

I nodded, still waiting.

He looked away. “You don’t have to leave.”

So I didn’t.

We lay in his bed, side by side, chaste. I waited, expecting his hands, his mouth, the weight of his body. I would give him what he wanted. Might even enjoy it. Anything not to be alone.

He shifted closer and put his hand over mine. I waited for more, but a long while passed. Eventually, I heard long, even breaths from his side of the bed. Surprised, I turned my head. He was dead asleep.

I gazed at him until I slept, too.

Cycles.

Deka woke some time before dawn and shook me awake. Quite without planning, we did what mortal lovers have done since time immemorial, stumbling blearily around each other as we each prepared for the day. While he spoke to the servants, ordering tea and summoning a clerk to distribute messages to the scriveners, assassins, and courtiers he’d chosen to accompany us, I went into the bathroom and made myself presentable. Then while he did the same, I drank the tea and peeked at his desk, where he’d scribbled notes about defensive magic and begun penning some sort of request to the Litaria. He caught me doing this as he emerged from his bedroom, but he didn’t seem to care, walking past me and checking to see how much tea I’d left him. (Not much. This earned me a glower. I shrugged.)

We proceeded to the forecourt. A group of thirty or so scriveners, soldiers, and various highbloods were already there, including Shahar, who stood dressed in a furred traveling cloak against the brisk morning air. She nodded to us as we arrived, and I nodded back, which made her blink. Servants were arriving, too, carrying trunks and satchels that probably contained more of the highbloods’ belongings than their own. As the eastern horizon grew more solidly pale with the imminence of dawn, Remath arrived—and with her, to my great surprise, came Itempas and Yeine. I saw many of the other assembled folk peer at the latter in confusion, since they were obviously not of the family. Yeine stopped some ways back, turning toward the distant horizon as if hearing its call; this was her time. Itempas broke off from Remath as they reached the group, coming to stand near the rest of us, though not close enough for conversation. He watched Yeine.

Deka turned, staring at Itempas, and then abruptly his eyes widened. “Sieh, is that—”

“Yes,” I snapped. I folded my arms and carefully ignored both of them.

Ramina was there as well, clearly awaiting Remath, as was Morad, who was dressed for travel. That surprised me. Was Remath willing even to give up her lover to this madness? Perhaps they were not so close after all. Morad’s face was impassive, but I suspected she was less than happy about it.

“Good morning, my friends,” Remath said, though aside from Morad, no one there was her friend. “By now matters have been explained to you. Naturally you will be unhappy at the short notice, but this was necessary for the sake of secrecy and safety. I trust there are no objections.”

In any other circumstance, there would have been, but these were Arameri, and particularly ones who had been chosen for their wits and value. Silence greeted her in response.

“Very well. We await one final guest, and then we will proceed.”

Abruptly the world gave a faint, and deliciously familiar, shudder. It was a delicate thing, yet powerful; even the mortals could feel it. The daystone beneath our feet creaked ominously, while the satinbell trees in the nearby Garden of the Hundred Thousand shivered, shedding some of their perfect dangling blossoms. And I closed my eyes, inhaling so that I would not whoop for joy.

“Sieh?” Shahar’s voice, alarmed and puzzled. Her ancestors had known this sensation, but no Arameri in a hundred years had felt it. I opened my eyes and smiled at her, so fondly that she blinked and almost smiled back.

“My father returns,” I whispered.

Beyond us, Yeine turned; she was smiling, too. Itempas—he had turned away from us, gazing off toward the palace as if it was suddenly the most interesting of sights. But I saw the stiffness in his shoulders, the effort that it took him to stay relaxed.

Nahadoth faded into view near Yeine, a storm weaving itself from nothingness into a semblance of mortal flesh. The shape that he took was an homage to his time of suffering: male, pale, the tendrils of his substance bleeding away like drifting, living smoke. (There had been a mortal body within that smoke once: Ahad. Did he shiver now, somewhere in the city below, feeling the nearby presence of his old prisoner?) Nahadoth’s shape was the only thing that had not changed since the days of his enslavement, for I felt his power now, gloriously whole and terrible, a weight upon the very air. Chaos and darkness, pure and unleashed.

There were murmurs and cries of alarm within the group of Arameri as Nahadoth manifested, though Remath quelled them with a glare. Making an example of herself, she stepped forward. I did not think less of her for pausing to steel herself.

I did think better of Shahar, though, who took a deep breath and moved away from us, hurrying to her mother’s side. Remath glanced back at her, forgetting to hide her surprise. Shahar inclined her head in taut reply. She had, after all, met Nahadoth before. Together, both women proceeded to join the two gods.

Deka did not attempt to join them. He had folded his arms and begun to shift from foot to foot, throwing frowns at Itempas and then at me, generally radiating unhappiness. It was not difficult to guess at the source of his distress: the Three walked among us, even if they were not quite complete, and Deka was not stupid enough to believe they had all come merely to build the Arameri’s vacation home. No doubt he guessed now why I had been so upset the night before.

I came for you, Itempas had said.

I folded my arms across my chest as well, but this was not defensive. It just took effort to steel myself against hope.

Then the conversation was done, and Yeine looked up at all of us, nodding once in absent reply to something Remath said. Her eyes met mine across the forecourt just as, beyond her, the horizon flared gold with the sun’s first delicate rays. For just an instant—as fleeting as the dawn itself—her form changed, becoming something indescribable. My mind tried to define it anyway, using images and sensations that its mortal perceptions could encompass. A phantasm of herself drawn in silver-pastel mist. A vast and impossible landscape, dominated by a whole forest of trees as great as the one that cradled us now. The scent and taste of ripe fruit, tooth-tender and succulently sweet. For a moment I ached with most unfilial yearnings: lust for her, jealousy for Naha, and pity for Tempa because he had gotten to taste her only once.

Then the moment passed, and Yeine was herself again, and her smile was for me alone, her first and favorite son. I would not give up that specialness for all the world.

“Time to go,” she said.

And suddenly we were no longer in Sky.

“We” being all of us, gods and Arameri, right down to the servants and baggage. One moment we were in Sky’s forecourt, and the next, the forty or so of us were somewhere else in the world, transported by a flick of Yeine’s will. It was later here; the dawn had advanced into full morning, but I paid little attention to this. I was too busy laughing at the Arameri, most of whom were stumbling or gasping or otherwise trying not to panic, because we stood atop an ocean. Waves surrounded us, an endless plain of gently heaving emptiness. When I looked down, I saw that our feet dented the water, as though someone had laid a thin and flexible coating between the liquid and our shoes. When the waves bobbed beneath us, we bobbed with them but did not sink. Some of the Arameri fell over, unable to adjust. I chuckled and braced my feet apart, balancing easily. The trick was to lean forward and rely on one’s core, not the legs. I had skated oceans of liquefied gas, long ago. This was not so different.

“Bright Father help us!” cried someone.

“You need no help,” Itempas snapped, and the man fell over, staring at him. Tempa, of course, was rock-steady upon the waves.

“Will this do?” Yeine asked Remath. Remath, I was amused to see, had solved the problem of maintaining balance and dignity by dropping to one knee again.

“Yes, Lady,” Remath replied. A swell passed beneath us, making everyone rise and then drop several feet. Yeine, I noted, did not move as this occurred; the dent beneath her feet simply deepened as the water rose and flowed around her. And the swell died the instant it drew near Nahadoth, the wave’s force dissipating into scattered, pointless motion.

“Where are we?” Shahar asked. She had knelt as well, following Remath’s lead, but even this seemed difficult for her. She did not look up as she spoke, concentrating on remaining at least somewhat upright.

It was Nahadoth who answered. He had turned to face the sun, narrowing his eyes with a faint look of distaste. It did not harm him, however, because it was just one small star, and it was always night somewhere in the universe.

“The Ovikwu Sea,” he said. “Or so it was last called, long ago.”

I began to chuckle. Everyone nearby looked at me in confusion. “The Ovikwu,” I said, letting my voice carry so they could all share the joke, “was a landbound sea in the middle of the Maroland—the continent that once existed where we now stand.” The continent that had been destroyed by the Arameri when they’d been foolish enough to try and use Nahadoth as their weapon. He’d done what they wanted, and then some.

Deka inhaled. “The first Sky. The one that was destroyed.”

Nahadoth turned—and paused, gazing at him for far too long a breath. I tensed, my belly clenching. Did he notice the familiarity of Deka’s features, so clearly etched with Ahad’s stamp? If he realized what Deka was, what Remath and Shahar were… Would he listen if I pleaded for their lives?

“The first Sky is directly below,” he said. And then he looked at me. He knew. I swallowed against sudden fear.

“Not for long,” said Yeine.

She raised a hand in a graceful beckoning gesture toward the sea beneath us. The Three can bring new worlds into existence at will; they can set galaxies spinning with a careless breath. It took Yeine no effort to do what she did then. She didn’t need to gesture at all. That was just her sense of theater.

But I think she’d overestimated the mortal attention span. No one noticed her once the first stones burst from the sea.

It was Deka who murmured for a bubble of air to form around all of us, warding off the now-churning waves and spray. Thus we were safe, able to watch in undisturbed awe as jagged, seaweed-draped and coral-encrusted chunks of daystone—the smallest the size of the Arms of Night—rose beneath and around us. Rubble undisturbed for centuries: it rose now, tumbling upward, stone piling atop stone and fusing, walls forming and shedding debris, courtyards rising beneath our feet to take the place of the heaving waves, structure shaping itself from nothingness.

Then it was done, and the spray cleared, and we looked around to find ourselves standing atop glory.

Take a nautilus shell; cut it cross section. Gently elevate its swirling, chambered tiers as they approach the tight-bound center, culminating at last in a pinnacle on which we all stood. Note its asymmetrical order, its chaotic repetition, the grace of its linkages. Contemplate the ephemerality of its existence. Such is the beauty that is mortal life.

This was not Sky, old or new. It was smaller than both its predecessor palaces and deceptively simpler. Where those earlier structures had been built compact and high, this palace hugged the ocean’s surface. Instead of sharp spires piercing the sky, here there were low, smoothly sloping buildings, joined by dozens of lacy bridges. The foundation—for the palace had been built atop a kind of convex platform—was many-lobed and odd, with spars and indentations jutting out in every direction. Its surface gleamed in the dawn light, white and nacreous as pearl, the only similarity between it and Sky.

I could feel the power woven into every sweeping balustrade, keeping the massive edifice afloat—but there was more to it than magic. Something about the structure itself worked to maintain its buoyancy. If I had still been a god, I might have understood it, for there are rules even where we are concerned, and it was Yeine’s nature to seek balance. Perhaps the magic harnessed the ocean’s waves in some new way or absorbed the power of the sun. Perhaps the foundation was hollow. Regardless, it was clear this new palace would float, and with some assistive magic would travel readily across the ocean. It would defend the precious cargo within its walls, if only because no mortal army could assail it.

While the mortals turned about, most of them speechless with awe, the rest making sounds of shock and delight and incomprehension, I strode across the drying daystone of the central platform. Yeine and Nahadoth turned to face me.

“Not bad,” I said. “Bit white, though, isn’t it?”

Yeine shrugged, amused. “You were thinking gray walls? Do you want them all to kill themselves?”

I looked around, considering the vast but monotonous surrounding oceanscape. Faintly I could hear surf and wind; aside from that there was silence. I grimaced. “Point. But that doesn’t mean they should have to endure the same boring, austere sameness of the previous two palaces, does it? They’re yours now. Find some way to remind them of that.”

She thought a moment. Nahadoth, however, smiled. Suddenly the daystone beneath our feet softened, turning to thick black loam. Everywhere I looked—on railings, edging the bridges—the daystone had remolded itself into troughs of soil.

Yeine laughed and went to him, a teasing look in her eye. “A hint?” She extended her hand, and he took it. I could not help noticing the easy camaraderie between them and the sudden softness of Nahadoth’s cabochon eyes when he gazed at her. His ever-changing face grew still, too, becoming a different kind of familiar: brown-skinned and angular and Darren. I fought the urge to glance at Deka, to see if he had noticed.

“We have always built better together than alone,” Naha said. Yeine leaned against him, and the soft dark tendrils of his aura swept forward to surround her. They did not touch her, but they did not have to.

A movement at the corner of my vision drew my attention. Itempas had turned away from his siblings’ intimacy, watching me instead. I gazed back at him in his solitude, surprised to feel sympathy instead of the usual anger. We two outcasts.

Then I spied Shahar, standing near Dekarta. He was alight as I had never seen him, turning and turning to try and take in the whole of the palace. It looked as though he would never stop grinning. I thought of the adventure novels he’d loved so as a child and wished I was still god enough to enjoy this pleasure with him.

Shahar, more subdued, was smiling, too, glancing now and again at the spirals, but mostly she was just watching him. Her brother, whom she’d lost for so long, come back to her at last.

And purely by chance as I watched them, they noticed me. Deka’s grin grew wider; Shahar’s small smile lingered. They did not join hands as they walked over to me, stepping carefully over the soft soil, but the bond between them was obvious to anyone who knew how love looked. That this bond included me was equally obvious. I turned to them, and for a long and wondrous moment, I was not alone.

Then Yeine said, “Come, Sieh,” and the moment ended.

Shahar and Deka stopped, their smiles fading. I saw understanding come. They had made me mortal so I could be their friend. What would happen to us once I was a god again?

A hand touched my shoulder, and I looked up. Itempas stood there. Ah, yes; he had loved mortals, too, over the years. He knew how it felt to leave them behind.

“Come,” he said gently.

Without another word, I turned my back on Dekarta and Shahar and went with him.

Yeine and Nahadoth met us, and their power folded around us, and we vanished just as the first green shoots began to push up from the soil.

18

The chamber in which we appeared was not far from the others. Still in the new palace, in fact—one of the smaller, delicate nautilus chambers that had formed on the palace’s outermost edges, covered over by prism glass. As soon as we appeared in it, I knew what it really was: a pocket of space made different from the world around it, ideal for scrivening or channeling magic without spreading the magic’s effects to the surrounding structure. Deka would love these when he found them.

Nahadoth and Yeine faced Itempas, who gazed back at them. No expression on any face, though this meant little, I knew, for they had never needed words to speak. Too much of what they needed to exchange was emotion in any case. Perhaps that was why, when Nahadoth spoke, he kept his words brief and his manner cool.

“Until sunset,” he said. “You will have that much parole.”

Itempas nodded slowly. “I will attend to Sieh at once, of course.”

“When sunset comes and you return to mortal flesh, you will be weak,” Yeine added. “Be sure you prepare.”

Itempas only sighed, nodding again.

It was an intentional cruelty. They had granted him parole for my sake, but we needed his power for only a moment. For them to allow a whole day of freedom beyond that, when they would only snatch it back at the day’s end, was just their way of turning the knife again. He deserved it, I reminded myself, deserved it in spades.

But I will not pretend it didn’t trouble me.

Then there was a shimmer, all that my mortal mind could perceive, and the whole world sang clean when they stripped the mortal covering from him and cast it away. Itempas did not cry out, though he should have. I would have. Instead he only shuddered, closing his eyes as his hair turned to an incandescent nimbus and his clothes glowed as if woven from stars and—I would have laughed, if this had not been sacred—his boots turned white. Even with my dull mortal senses, I felt the effort he exerted to control the sudden blaze of his true self, the wash of heat that it sent across the surface of reality, tsunamis in the wake of a meteor strike. He stilled it all, leaving only profound silence.

Would I do as well, when I was a god again? Probably not. Most likely I would shout and jump up and down, and maybe start dancing across any planets nearby.

Soon, now.

When the blaze of Itempas’s restoration had passed, he paused for a moment longer, perhaps composing himself. I braced myself when he focused on me, as he had promised. But then, almost imperceptibly—I would not have noticed if I hadn’t known him so well—he frowned.

“What is it?” asked Yeine.

“There is nothing wrong with him,” Itempas replied.

“Nothing wrong with me?” I gestured at myself, with my man’s hand. I’d had to shave again that morning and had nicked my jaw in the process. It still hurt, damn it. “What is there about me that isn’t wrong?”

Itempas shook his head slowly. “It is my nature to perceive pathways,” he said. An approximation of what he meant, since we were speaking in Senmite out of respect for my delicate mortal flesh. “To establish them where none exist and to follow those already laid. I can restore you to what you are meant to be. I can halt that which has gone wrong. But nothing about you, Sieh, is wrong. What you have become…” He looked at Yeine and Nahadoth. He would never have done anything so undignified as throw up his hands, but his frustration was a palpable thing. “He is as he should be.”

“That cannot be,” said Nahadoth, troubled. He stepped toward me. “This is not his nature. His growth damages him. How can this be meant?”

“And who,” asked Yeine, speaking slowly because she was not as practiced as the other two at rendering our concepts into mortal speech, “has meant it?”

They looked at each other, and belatedly I realized the gist of their words. I would not be regaining my godhood today. Sighing, I turned away from them and went over to the curving nacre wall. I sat down against it and propped my arms on my knees.

And, quite predictably, things went very bad, very fast.

“This cannot be,” Nahadoth said again, and I knew his anger by the way the little chamber suddenly dimmed despite the bright morning sunlight filtering through its glass ceiling. Only the chamber dimmed, however, rather than the whole sky. Clever Yeine, planning for her brothers’ tempers. If only I had not been trapped in the chamber with them.

Nahadoth stepped toward Itempas, his aura weaving itself darker and thinner, becoming a glow that no mortal eyes should have been able to see by any law of nature—but of course he defied such laws, so the blackness was plain to all.

“You have always been a coward, Tempa,” he said. The words skittered around the chamber’s walls, darting, striking in echoes. “You pressed for the demons’ slaughter. You fled this realm after the War and kept our children away, leaving us to deal with the mess. Shall I believe you now when you say you cannot help my son?”

I waited for the explosion of Itempas’s fury and all the usual to follow. They would fight, and Yeine would do as Enefa had always done and keep their battle contained, and only when they were both exhausted would she try to reason with them.

I was so tired of this. So tired of all of it.

But the surprise was mine. Itempas shook his head slowly. “I would do no less than my best by our child, Naha.” Only the faintest of emphasis on our, I noticed, where once he would have made a show of possession. He did not look at me, but he didn’t have to. Every word that Itempas spoke had meaning, often in multiple layers. He knew, as I did, that his claim on me was precarious at best.

I frowned at him, wondering at this newfound humility; it did not at all seem like the Tempa I knew. Nor did his calm in the face of Nahadoth’s accusation. Nahadoth frowned at this, too, more in suspicion than surprise.

And then something else unexpected happened: Yeine stepped forward, looking at Nahadoth with annoyance. “This serves no purpose,” she snapped. “We did not come here to rehash old grievances.” And then, before Nahadoth could flare at her, she touched his arm. “Look to our son, Naha.”

Startled out of anger, Nahadoth turned to me. All three of them looked at me, in fact, radiating a combination of pity and chagrin. I smiled back at them, bleak in my despair.

“Nicely done,” I said. “You only forgot I was here for half a minute.”

Nahadoth’s jaw tightened. I took an obscure pride in this.

Yeine sighed, stepping between her taller brothers with a glare at each, and came to my side. She crouched beside me, balancing on her toes; as usual she wore no shoes. When I did not move, she shifted to sit against me, her head resting on my shoulder. I closed my eyes and pressed my cheek against her hair.

“There is another option,” Nahadoth said at last, breaking the silence. He spoke slowly, reluctantly. Change should not have been difficult for him, but I could see that this was. “When we are of one accord, all things become possible.”

Again, I expected a reaction that Itempas did not provide. “Sieh’s restoration is something we all desire.” He spoke stiffly because change was difficult for him. Yet he made the effort anyway, even though it was an extreme suggestion: to bring together the Three as they had not done since the dawning of the universe. To remake reality, if that was what it took to remake me.

To this, I had no snide remark. I stared at them, Naha and Tempa, standing side by side and trying, for my sake, to get along.

Yeine lifted her head, which forced me to do the same. “I am willing, of course,” she said to them, though she sounded concerned. “But I have never done this before. Is there danger to Sieh?”

“Some,” said Itempas.

“Perhaps,” said Nahadoth.

At Yeine’s frown, I touched her hand, explaining as I had done for Shahar and Deka. “If the Three’s accord is not total”—I nodded toward Itempas and Nahadoth, not needing to be subtle in my meaning—“if there is any hint of discord between you, things could go very wrong.”

“How wrong?”

I shrugged. I had not seen it happen myself, but I understood the principle. It was simple: their will became reality. Any conflicts in their respective desires manifested as natural law—inertia and gravity, time and perception, love and sorrow. Nothing that the Three did was subtle.

Yeine considered this for a long moment. Then she reached up to caress my hair. As a boy, I had loved for her to do this. As a man, I found it awkward. Patronizing. But I tolerated it.

“Then there is danger,” she said, troubled. “I want what you want. And it seems to me that what you want is not entirely clear.”

I smiled sadly. Itempas’s eyes narrowed. He and Nahadoth exchanged a knowing look. That was nice, actually. Like old times. Then they remembered that they hated each other and focused on me again.

It was ironic, really, and beautiful in its way. The problem was not them but me. The Three walked the world again and had come together in the hope of saving me. And I could not be saved, because I was in love with two mortals.

Yeine sighed. “You need time to think.” She got to her feet, brushing unnecessarily at her pants, and faced Nahadoth and Itempas. “And we have business of our own to discuss, Sieh. Where shall we send you?”

I shook my head, rubbing my head wearily. “I don’t know. Somewhere else.” I gestured vaguely at the palace. “I’ll make my own way.” I always did.

Yeine glanced back at me as if she’d heard that last thought, but like a good mother, she let it pass unremarked. “Very well.”

Then the world blurred, and I found myself sitting in a large open chamber of the new palace. Templelike, its ceiling arched high overhead, thirty or forty feet away. Vines dangled from its cornices and wended down the curving pillars. In the handful of minutes since we’d left, Yeine’s power had thoroughly permeated the palace and covered it in green. The daystone was no longer precisely white, either: one wall of the chamber faced the sun, translucent, and against the bright backdrop I saw white stone marbled with something darker, gray shading to black. The black was studded with tiny white points, like stars. Perhaps they would glow, too, come night.

Deka sat there on his knees, alone. What had he been doing, praying? Holding vigil while my mortality passed away? How quaint. And how unsubtle of Yeine, to send me to him. I would never have figured her for a matchmaker.

“Deka,” I said.

He started, turned, and frowned at me in surprise. “Sieh? I thought—”

I shook my head, not bothering to get up. “I have unfinished business, it seems.”

“What—” No. Deka was too smart to ask that question. I saw understanding, elation, guilt, and hope flow across his face in a span of seconds before he caught himself and put his Arameri mask in place instead. He got to his feet and came over, offering a hand to help me up, which I took. When I was up, however, there was a moment of awkwardness. We were both men now, and most men would have stepped apart after such a gesture, putting distance between themselves so as to maintain the necessary boundaries of independence and camaraderie. I did not move away, and neither did Deka. Awkwardness passed into something entirely different.

“We were thinking about what to name this palace,” he said softly. “Shahar and I.”

I shrugged. “Seashell? Water?” I had never been much for creative naming. Deka, who had taste, grimaced at my suggestions.

“Shahar likes ‘Echo.’ She’ll have to run it past Mother, of course.” So fascinating, this conversation. Our mouths moved, speaking about things neither of us cared about, a verbal mask for entirely different words that did not need to be said. “She thinks this will make a good audience chamber.” Another grimace, this one more delicate.

I smiled. “You disagree?”

“It doesn’t feel like an audience chamber. It feels…” He shook his head, turning to face a spot beneath the translucent swirl-wall. I took his meaning. There was a votive atmosphere to this chamber, something difficult to define. There should have been an altar in that spot.

“So tell her,” I said.

He shrugged. “You know how it is. Shahar is still… Shahar.” He smiled, but it faded.

I nodded. I didn’t really want to talk about Shahar.

Deka’s hand brushed mine, tentative. This was something he could have played off as an accident, if I let him. “Perhaps you should bless this place. It’s a trick, of a sort, or it will be. The real home of the Arameri, leaving Sky as a decoy…”

“I can’t bless anything anymore, except in the poetic sense.” I took his hand, growing tired of the game. No semblance of just-friends anymore. “Shall I become a god again, Deka? Is that what you want?”

He flinched, thrown by my directness, his mask cracking. Through it I saw need so raw that it made me ache in sympathy. But he abandoned the game, too, because that was what the moment deserved. “No.”

I smiled. If I had still been a god, my teeth would have been sharp. “Why not? I could still love you, as a god.” I stepped closer, nuzzling his chin. He did not take this bait or the verbal bait I offered next. “Your family would love you better, if I were a god. Your god.”

Deka’s hands gripped my arms, tight. I expected him to thrust me away, but he didn’t. “I don’t care what they want,” he said, his voice suddenly low, rough. “I want an equal. I want to be your equal. When you were a god, I couldn’t be that, so… So help me, yes, some part of me wished you were mortal. It wasn’t deliberate, I didn’t know what would happen, but I don’t regret it. So Shahar’s not the only one who betrayed you.” I flinched, and his hands tightened, to the threshold of pain. He leaned closer, intent. “As a child, I was nothing to you. A game to pass the time.” When I blinked in surprise, he laughed bitterly. “I told you, Sieh. I know everything about you.”

“Deka—” I began, but he cut me off.

“I know why you’ve never taken a mortal lover as more than a passing whim. Even before mortals were created, you’d lived so long, seen so much, that no mortal could be anything but an eyeblink in the eternity of your life. That’s if you were willing to try, and you weren’t. But I will not be nothing to you, Sieh. And if I must change the universe to have you, then so be it.” He smiled again, tight, vicious, beautiful. Terrifying.

Arameri.

“I should kill you,” I whispered.

“Do you think you could?” Unbelievable, his arrogance. Magnificent. He reminded me of Itempas.

“You sleep, Deka. You eat. Not all my tricks need magic.”

His smile grew an edge of sadness. “Do you really want to kill me?” When I didn’t answer—because I didn’t know—he sobered. “What do you want, Sieh?”

And because I was afraid, and because Yeine had asked the same question, and because Deka really did know me too well, I answered with the truth.

“N-not to be alone anymore.” I licked my lips and looked away—at the altar-less floor, at a nearby pillar, at the sun diluted by swirls of white and black and gray. Anywhere but at him. I was so very, very tired. I had been tired for an age of the world. “To have… I want… something that is mine.”

Deka let out a long, shaky sigh, pressing his forehead against mine as if he’d just won some victory. “Is that all?”

“Yes. I want—”

And then there was no repeating what I wanted, because his mouth was on mine and his soul was in me and it was frightening to be invaded—and exhilarating and agonizing. Like racing comets and chasing thoughtwhales and skating along freezing liquid air. It was better than the first time. He still kissed like a god.

Then his mouth was on my throat, his hands tugging open my shirt, his legs pushing us back back back until I stopped against one of the vine-covered pillars. I barely noticed despite the breath being knocked out of me. I was gasping now because he’d bitten me just over my lower rib cage, and that was the most erotic sensation I’d ever felt. I reached out to touch him and found hot mortal skin and humming tattooed magic, free of the encumbering cloth as he stripped himself. There are so many ways to make magic. I tapped a cadence over his shoulders, and hot, raw power seared up my arms in response. I drank it in and moaned. He had made himself strong and wise, a god in mortal flesh, for me, me, me. Was he right? I had always avoided mortals. It made no sense for a being older than the sun to want a creature that would always be less than a child, in relative terms. But I did want him; oh gods, how I wanted him. Was that the solution? It was not my nature to do what was wise; I did what felt good. Why should that not apply to love as well as play?

Had I truly been fighting myself all this time?

Movement on the edge of my vision pulled me out of the haze of Deka’s teeth and hands. I focused on reality and saw Shahar, in the entryway of the marbled chamber. She had stopped there, framed by the corridor beyond, illuminated by the swirling sun. Her eyes were wide, her face paler than ever, her lips a flat white line. I remembered those lips soft and open, welcoming, and in spite of everything, I craved her again. I stroked Deka’s straight hair and thought of hers coiling round my fingers and—Gods, no, I would go mad if I kept this up.

Something that was mine. I looked down at Deka, who’d crouched at my feet, licking the bite on my ribs as I shuddered. His hands cupped my waist, as gentle as if I were made of eggshell. (I was. It was called mortal flesh.) Beautiful, perfect boy. Mine.

“Prove it,” I whispered. “Show me how much you love me, Deka.”

He looked up at me. I realized he knew Shahar was there. Of course; the bond between us. Perhaps that was why she’d come here, too, at this precise moment, out of the whole vast empty palace. I was lonely. I needed. That need drew them to me now, just as my need had drawn them on a long-ago day in Sky’s underpalace. We had shared something powerful when we took our oath, but the connection had been there even beforehand. That could not be broken by something so paltry as betrayal.

All this was in Deka’s eyes as he gazed up at me. I do not know what he saw in mine. Whatever it was, though, he nodded once. Then he rose, never taking his hands off me, and turned me gently to face the pillar. When he spoke into my ear, the words were gods’ language. That made me believe them, and trust him, because they could be nothing but true.

“I’ll never hurt you,” he said, and proved it.

Shahar left sometime during what followed. Not immediately. She stayed for a long while, in fact, listening to my groans and watching while I stopped caring about her, or even being aware of her presence. Perhaps she even lingered after I pulled her little brother to the floor and made a proper altar of it, wringing sweat and tears and songs of praise from him, and blessing him with pleasure in return. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. Deka was my only world, my only god. Yes, I used him, but he wanted me to. I would worship him forever.

I was exhausted afterward. Deka wasn’t tired at all, the bastard. He sat up awhile, using the floor to idly trace the outlines of sigils that he intended to draw into the new palace’s substance as part of its first layer of arcane protection. Apparently teams of soldiers and scriveners had already begun exploring the palace and mapping its wonders. He told me about this while I lay in a stupor. It was as though he’d gorged himself on my vitality, leaving me little better than a husk. Then it occurred to me that during our lovemaking, it had been he who’d drawn us out of the world and back; his kisses, not mine, had woven our souls together. He was still one-eighth of a god. I was all mortal.

If this was how mortals usually felt when a god was done with them, I felt fresh guilt for all my past dalliances.

Eventually I recovered, however, and told Deka that I needed to leave. All the highbloods were selecting apartments in the uppermost central spirals of the palace—the old pattern from Sky. It would be easy for me to find him later. There was an uncomfortable moment when Deka gave me a long and silent perusal before replying, but whatever he saw in my face satisfied him. He nodded and rose to get dressed himself.

“Be careful,” was all he said. “My sister may be dangerous now.”

I thought that was probably true.

I found Itempas less than a half hour before sunset. As I’d suspected, he’d taken up residence on the wide central platform where we’d first arrived, which had become a meadow of bobbing sea grass in the meantime. This palace had not been configured to exalt him; nevertheless, the highest center point of anything was a natural place for him to settle.

He stood facing the sun, his legs braced apart and arms folded, unmoving, though he must have sensed my approach. The grass whispered against my pant legs as I walked, and I saw that the grass nearest Itempas had turned white. Typical.

I did not see Nahadoth or Yeine or feel their presence nearby. They had abandoned him again.

“Want to be alone?” I asked, stopping behind him. The sun had almost touched the sea in the distance. He could count the remaining moments of his godhood on one hand. Maybe two.

“No,” he said, so I sat down in the grass, watching him.

“I’ve decided that I want to remain mortal,” I said. “At least until… you know. Close to. Ah. The end. Then the three of you can try to change me back.” Unspoken was the fact that I might change my mind again then and choose to die with Deka. It was a choice that not every god got to make. I was very fortunate.

He nodded. “We felt your decision.”

I grimaced. “How unromantic. And here I was thinking that was an orgasm.”

He ignored my irreverence out of long habit. “Your love for those two has been clear to all of us since your transformation into mortal, Sieh. Only you have resisted this knowledge.”

I hated it when he got sanctimonious, so I changed the subject. “Thanks for trying, by the way. To help me.”

He sighed gently. “I wonder, sometimes, why you think so little of me. Then I remember.”

“Yes. Well.” I shrugged, uncomfortable. “Is Glee coming to fetch you?” Unspoken: when you are mortal again?

“Yes.”

“She really loves you, you know.”

He turned, just enough so that I could see his face. “Yes.”

I was babbling, and he had noticed. Annoyed, I stopped talking. The silence collected around us, comfortable. In the old days, I had only ever liked being quiet around him. With anyone else, the urge to fill the silence with chatter or movement was overwhelming. He had never needed to command me to be still. Around him, I just wanted to.

We watched the sun inch toward the horizon. “Thank you,” he said suddenly, surprising me.

“Hmm?”

“For coming here.”

At this, I sighed and shifted and rubbed a hand over my hair. Finally I got up, coming to stand beside him. I could feel the radiant warmth of his presence, skin tightening even from a foot away. He could blaze with the fire and light of every sun in existence, but most times he kept the furnace banked so that others could be near him. His version of a friendly invitation—because naturally he would never, ever just say he was lonely, the fool.

And somehow, I had never, ever noticed that he did this. What did that make me? His twice-fool son, I supposed.

So I stayed there beside him while we watched the last curve of the sun flatten into an oblong, then puddle against the edge of the world, and finally melt away. The instant this happened, Itempas gasped, and I felt a sudden swift wave of heat, as of something rushing away. What remained in its wake was human, ordinary, just a middle-aged man in plain clothes and worn boots (brown again, ha ha!) with too much hair for practicality. And when he toppled backward like an old broken tree, unconscious in the aftermath of godhood, it was I who caught him, and eased him to the floor, and cradled his head in my lap.

“Stupid old man,” I whispered. But I stroked his hair while he slumbered.

Would that things could have ended there.

A moment after I’d settled down with Itempas, I felt a presence behind me and did not turn. Let Glee think what she would of me with her father. I was tired of hating him. “Make him decorate his hair,” I said, more to make conversation than anything else. “If he’s going to wear his hair in a Teman style, he ought to do it right.”

“So,” said Kahl, and I went rigid with shock. His voice was soft, regretful. “You have forgiven him.”

What—

Before the thought could form, he was in front of me, on Itempas’s other side, with one hand poised in a way that made no sense to me—until he plunged it down, and too late I remembered that Glee had been protecting him from this very thing.

By that point, Kahl’s hand was up to the wrist in Itempas’s chest.

Itempas jerked awake, rigid, his face a rictus of agony. I did not waste time screaming denial. Denial was for mortals. Instead I grabbed Kahl’s arm with all my strength, trying to keep him from doing what I knew he was about to do. But I was just a mortal, and he was a godling, and not only did he rip Itempas’s heart out in a blur of splattering red, but he also threw me across the platform in the process. I rolled to a halt amid the salt-sweet stench of bruised sea grass, barely three feet from the edge. There were steps wending around the platform, but if I’d missed those, it was a long way—several hundred feet—to the base of the palace.

Dazed, I struggled upright and discovered that my arm was dislocated. As I finished screaming from this, I looked up and found Kahl standing between me and Itempas’s corpse. The heart was in his hand, dripping; his expression was implacable.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve been hunting him for years now. His demon daughter is good at hiding. I knew that if I watched you, however, I would eventually get my chance.”

“What—” Hard to think around pain. If mortals could do it, I could, damn it. I ground my teeth and spoke through them. “What in the infinite hells is wrong with you? You know that won’t kill him. And now Naha and Yeine will be after you.” I was not a god anymore. I could not call them with my thoughts. What could I do, as a mortal, facing the god of vengeance in the moment of his triumph? Nothing. Nothing.

“Let them come.” So familiar, that arrogance. Where had I seen it before? “They haven’t found me yet. I can complete the mask now and take it back from Usein.” He lifted Itempas’s heart, peering intently at it, and for the first time I saw him smile in unreserved pleasure. His lips drew back, showing a hint of canine—

—sharp teeth, so much like—

“Only a spark left. Just enough, though.”

I understood then, or thought I did. What Kahl had sought was not Itempas’s mere blood or flesh, but the pure bright power of the god of light. As a mortal, Itempas had none, and in his true form he was too powerful. Only now, in the space between mortality and immortality, was Itempas both vulnerable and valuable—and I, powerless, was no sufficient guardian. Glee had been right not to trust me with him, though not for the reasons she feared.

“You’re going to take the mask from Usein?” I struggled to sit up, holding my arm. “But I thought…”

No. Oh, no. I had been so wrong.

A mask that conferred the power of gods. But Kahl had never meant for a mortal to wear it.

“You can’t.” I could not even imagine it. Once upon a time, there were three gods who had created all the realms. Less than three and it would all end. More than three and—“You can’t! If the power doesn’t rip you apart—”

“Are you concerned?” Kahl lowered the heart, his smile fading. There was anger in him now; all his earlier reticence and sadness had vanished. He had accepted his nature at last, waxing powerful in the moment of his triumph. Even if I had been my old self, I would have felt fear. One did not challenge the elontid at such times. “Do you care about me, Sieh?”

“I care about living, you demonshitting fool! What you’re planning…” It was a nightmare that no godling would admit dreaming. The Maelstrom had given birth to three gods down the course of eternity. Who knew if—or when—it might suddenly belch forth another? What we thought of as the universe, the collection of realities and embodiments that had been born from the Three’s warring and loving and infinitely careful craft, was too delicate to survive the onslaught of a Fourth. The Three themselves would endure, and adapt, and build a new universe that would incorporate the new one’s power. But everything of the old existence—including godlings and the entire mortal realm—would be gone.

There was a blur and suddenly Kahl was before me. To be more precise, his foot was on my chest, and I was on the ground being crushed beneath it. With my good hand I scrabbled for his booted foot but could gain no purchase on the fine, god-conjured leather. The only reason I could still breathe at all was the soil beneath my back: my torso had sunk into it rather than simply collapsing.

Kahl leaned over me, adding pressure to my lungs. Through watering eyes I saw his: narrow, deep-set slashes in the plane of his face, like Teman eyes. Like mine, though far colder. And they were green, too, like mine.

—like Enefa’s—

“Are you afraid?” He cocked his head as if genuinely curious, then leaned closer. I could almost hear my ribs groan, on the brink. But when I forced my face back up, muscles straining, throat bulging, I forgot all about my ribs. Because now Kahl was close enough that I could see his eyes clearly, and when his pupils flickered into narrow, deadly slits—

—eyes like Enefa’s no no EYES LIKE MINE—

I tried to scream.

“It’s far too late for you to care about me, Father,” he said.

The word fell into my mind like poison, and the veil on my memory shredded into tatters.

Kahl vanished then, and I do not remember what happened after that. There was a lot of pain.

But when I finally awoke, I was thirty years older.